Trump wants a peace prize, but Putin is not helping

Donald Trump came prancing into office on January 6th, saying he would end the Russian war on Ukraine on his first day as president, because he either believed he had some kind of influence over his Russian counterpart, or his desire to be bestowed the world’s most prestigious peace prize is greater than his grip on reality.

Although nobody has specifically called him naive, many experts and analysts have implied that Trump is underestimating Putin and is overwhelmingly optimistic in believing he can convince his Russian counterpart to desist from his unwavering determination to control the country, which he has on multiple occasions said “is ours”.

Correction. According to a psychological profile assembled for Putin in 2017, Moscow describes Trump as a person who likes taking risks but can be naive, New York magazine Intelligencer reported. 

A long-coveted peace prize

Peace prize nominations for Trump, who has long coveted the Nobel Prize, date to his first term, but he’s talking more in his second term about how he’s helping to end conflicts, how he wants to be known as a peacemaker and how much he wants to be awarded a prize, the AP wrote.

However, Trump seems to believe what he said about Putin six days ago. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, [if] you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

U-turns on Putin and Zelensky

Now, Trump is prepared to do something about it, at least that is what he is saying now, because truth be told, he has gone from describing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy” to calling him “absolutely crazy” for bombing civilians in the neighbouring country and, more recently, to telling Putin he would “bomb the shit out of Moscow”, according to a leaked audio.

Trump has also been on a back-and-forth on Ukraine, by cancelling weapons shipments and then reordering them again, and by halting intelligence sharing and then resuming it, and saying Volodymir Zelensky is a dictator who is jeopardising a peace deal with Russia, to finally today, Monday, July 14th, make another tonal u-turn.

Sitting next to a very delighted-looking NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, in the Oval Office, Trump announced an agreement with the alliance’s member countries that will lead to large-scale arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Trump also gave Russia an ultimatum, saying that if Moscow does not make peace within 50 days, the country will face severe sanctions.

“We’re very unhappy with Russia and we’ll be doing very severe tariffs … at about 100 per cent,” Trump said, according to Euro News. “We’ve spent $250 billion on this war … and we want to see it end. I am disappointed in Putin because I thought we’d have a deal two months ago.”

A ‘very big deal’

The US president said the “very big deal worth billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment is going to be purchased from the United States, going to NATO… And that’s going to be quickly distributed to the battlefield.”

The arms deal includes the urgently needed Patriot missiles, which Ukraine desperately wants for its defences against the increasing Russian aerial onslaught.

“It’s everything: it’s Patriots. It’s all of them. It’s a full complement, with the batteries,” Trump said, as if selling toys to kids’ parents.

Although the US president did not go into further detail, he made it very clear that Washington’s European allies would entirely pay for the weapons and that initial missile deliveries would come “within days” from European stocks, on the understanding that they would be replenished with US supplies.

‘And they’re going to pay’

“We’ll send them a lot of weapons of all kinds, and they’re going to deliver those weapons immediately … and they’re going to pay,” Trump said, adding there were 17 Patriots in a European country ready for shipment to Ukraine. Kyiv is currently thought to have only six Patriot batteries, at a time when it is coming under frequent and intense Russian drone and missile bombardments.

Regarding Putin, Trump said, “Look, I don’t want to say he’s an assassin, but he’s a tough guy. It’s been proven over the years. He’s fooled a lot of people,” Trump said, listing his predecessors in the White House. “He didn’t fool me. But what I do say is that at a certain point, ultimately, talk doesn’t talk. It’s got to be action.”

Russian officials and pro-war bloggers on Monday largely shrugged off Trump’s announcement, declaring it to be less significant than anticipated, the Guardian reported, and a Ukrainian journalist, Illia Ponomarenko, wrote: “How many Ukrainian lives could have been saved if, from the very beginning, Trump had listened to wise and honest people about helping Ukraine, instead of the artful lies of that cannibal Putin on the phone?”.