It’s no secret that U.S. President Donald Trump has long had scant patience for the Russia-Ukraine war, which he famously hoped to end in just twenty-four hours. But this week, it was Trump’s patience for Russian President Vladimir Putin that wore particularly thin.
At first, the Ukrainians and the Europeans fell victim to Trump’s impatience. In February, he grew tired of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s casual wardrobe, supposed ingratitude for billions of U.S. military aid, and unrealistic expectations for a peace agreement with Putin. At the same time, the Europeans drew Trump’s ire for Europe’s free-riding under the United States’ security umbrella. For a moment, after the Oval Office descended into a shouting match between Trump and Zelenskyy, Trump looked set to wash his hands of the whole affair and leave the Ukrainians and Europeans in the lurch.
Putin seized on this moment of allied discord by stalling the Americans and the Ukrainians with unserious peace negotiations in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, while redoubling Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian population centers and energy infrastructure. Despite this, the Ukrainians’ resolve and standing on the battlefield held firm, and the Europeans began to mobilize unprecedented capital and material to pull their weight in securing not only the continent but also Ukraine.
Now, Trump may well have finally lost his patience with the man he sees as standing between him and a Nobel Peace Prize: Putin. In his own words, he called out the Russian leader’s deceptiveness, “[Putin] fooled a lot of people. He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn’t fool me.” But clearly Trump has had a change of heart, at least for now, and it’s possible we may need to thank First Lady Melania Trump for his one-eighty. “I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today, and we had a wonderful conversation,’” Trump said Monday. “She said, ‘Oh really? Another city was just hit.’” Is this a temporary adjustment in perspective or will Trump emerge as a Russia hawk with a convert’s zealousness?
Last week, Trump overruled a decision by the Pentagon to halt the delivery of key air defense systems to Ukraine, including much-needed Patriot missiles. This aid wasn’t new, but rather part of the $29 billion backlog from the Biden administration’s congressionally authorized military assistance for Ukraine.
Then, in an Oval Office meeting on Monday with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Trump rolled out a new military aid mechanism in partnership with our European allies that could help funnel billions of advanced weapon systems, including more air-defense assets, to Ukraine. Under the proposed agreement, which mirrors the United States’ presidential drawdown authority, NATO countries will provide Ukraine with weapon systems directly from their existing inventories, and then backfill those transfers by purchasing comparable systems from U.S. defense contractors.
It is, in many respects, the ultimate Trump deal, a “three-for”: Europe imports more from the United States (supporting U.S. manufacturers and perhaps even having a modest effect on the bilateral trade deficit); the burden of paying for the weapons is borne by Europe, not the U.S. taxpayer; and the support for Ukraine might incentivize Putin to moderate his negotiating aims and come more seriously to the table.
Eventually, as European countries devote a higher percentage of their GDP to defense spending, European leaders are likely to come under political pressure at home to spend in their country, or at least in Europe. For now, the United States is the arms dealer of choice and that has multiple positive spillover effects. A recent soundbyte from German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says it all: “One thing is clear, and this is also a plea to all other European NATO members: We all must now open our wallets.”
Trump is also preparing to deploy his favorite weapon (and word) to turn up the heat on Putin. During his presser with Rutte, the president threatened to levy secondary tariffs of 100 percent on any country that does business with the Russians should Putin fail to reach a deal to end the war in the next fifty days. What constitutes doing business with the Russians remains to be determined, but what is certain is that for Trump, tariffs are about more than tackling trade barriers or even reindustrializing the U.S. economy. Trump views tariffs as his single-source-solution to bring countries to the negotiating table, or punish them for what he sees as wrongdoing. (Even last week, we saw initial indications of this approach when he announced 50 percent tariffs on Brazil for what he alleges is a “witch hunt” trial against former President Jair Bolsonaro.)
Combined, Trump’s pivot will increase pressure on Putin to negotiate, but we shouldn’t expect a dramatic change to the status quo on the battlefield or at the negotiating table in the near term.
On the military front, Trump’s decision to continue providing previously authorized U.S. aid is significant only insofar as it will help Ukraine hold the front line and avoid losing air cover over major cities and critical infrastructure. The new aid channel will provide a modest “Trump bump” but will not lead to a decisive shift in the military balance on the ground. Nor should we count on the United States or European allies providing the Ukrainians with large precision strike munitions capable of striking Moscow and St. Petersburg directly, unless Trump and his European counterparts’ appetite for dramatic Russian military escalation has substantially increased. (Trump reportedly asked Zelenskyy whether he could strike Moscow, an indication of just how far he has come from his initial sympathy for Russia’s position.)
Ukraine’s considerable manpower and material constraints—coupled with Russia’s military spending, troop mobilization, and burgeoning arms imports from North Korea, among other factors—imply that the correlation of forces in Ukraine will remain largely unchanged and modestly in Russia’s favor. Even so, a significant transfer of weapons could at least give Ukraine a fighting chance to blunt the impact of the current war of attrition. At the end of the day, as the Institute for the Study of War has observed, Putin believes in “a theory of victory that posits that indefinite Russian gains—no matter how slow or how costly—will allow Russia to achieve his goals in Ukraine.”
On the economic front, Trump’s punitive tariff plan is fraught. U.S.-Russia trade was a meager $3.5 billion in 2024 (or less than 1 percent of total Russian exports). Putin can afford for that number to hit zero. Hence his preference for secondary tariffs, but those represent a thorny proposition. In 2024, Russia traded some $240 billion with China, $70 billion with India, and tens of billions with Turkey—its top three trading partners. If Trump made good on his threat to impose broad secondary tariffs on those economies, it would be tantamount to establishing a trade embargo with a country that just recently demonstrated it has leverage over the United States, an emerging strategic partner, and a critical NATO ally.
As my colleague Brad Setser found, the bilateral elasticity of trade during the first Trump administration’s trade war was roughly 2, meaning that a 15 percent tariff resulted in a 30 percent fall in trade. With 100 percent tariffs, the vast majority of trade would stop in its tracks. Recall that Trump tried this 100 percent tariff gambit with China earlier this spring, and he couldn’t stomach the prospect of resulting consumer goods shortages and industrial supply chain shocks. It is hard to imagine he would be inclined to follow through with a broad trade embargo this time around for the sake of Ukraine. Indeed, Russian markets shrugged off the threat of economic coercion—with traders sending the ruble and the Moscow exchange higher in the wake of Trump’s policy pivot, which fell short of their worst-case expectations.
There aren’t any shortcuts to ending a war that Putin views as an existential enterprise. The swiftest route to peace will be convincing him that the United States is also in it for the long haul. Trump’s recent pivot is a good start. He would be well advised to work with the Europeans to scale-up the new aid mechanism, starve Putin’s war economy with new targeted sanctions, and convey to Putin that his renewed support for Ukraine will be the U.S. policy for the foreseeable future.
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