Trump's pivot on Ukraine shows he's unwilling to put maximum pressure on Putin

As Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office on Monday and announced that NATO would be buying U.S. weapons and shipping them to Kyiv, it was a major pivot for the U.S. president and for an administration that just two weeks ago halted the supply of some military hardware, including air defence missiles which were already en route to Ukraine. 

But while it was a sign that Trump has grown frustrated by Vladimir Putin's recalcitrance, the announcement was also a signal that Trump is unwilling to go all-in to pressure Russia's president. Instead of immediately hitting Moscow's trading partners with secondary sanctions, he offered the Kremlin a 50-day deadline to agree to a ceasefire.

Before his televised appearance alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump teased the announcement as "major."

Afterwards, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed gratitude, while Russian investors appeared relieved, as the stock market rose.  

Escalated attacks

Trump's announcement included broad statements, and scant details. He said that billions of dollars in weaponry would be sent, including Patriot missile defence systems, but there was no talk publicly about sending longer range cruise missiles, like Lockheed Martin's JASSMs, which have a range of about 370 kilometres. 

He said that if the Kremlin doesn't agree to a deal within 50 days, he would roll out those secondary sanctions against Russia's trading partners, and impose a 100 per cent tariff on all Russian goods that enter the U.S.

"Militarily it looks like [this deal] is useful, but without the detail, it's hard to know if it radically changes anything," said Matthew Saville, director of military sciences at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. 

"On sanctions, on tariffs, [Trump] is talking about another 50 days. Putin will use at least 49 of those days to continue to keep attacking Ukraine."

Russia has escalated its air attacks on Ukrainian cities, particularly Kyiv, where metro stations and shelters, which have been relatively empty throughout much of the war, are now crowded nightly during Russian barrages. 

The Patriot system is designed to take down cruise and ballistic missiles, but with each interceptor missile costing roughly $4 million US, Saville says it is "wildly uneconomical" to use them to shoot down drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars. 

Hundreds of enemy drones

Instead, when Moscow launches hundreds of Shahed and Geran drones, Kyiv uses small arms and other domestically produced drones to try to bring them down. 

Saville says Ukraine's interception rate is normally 85 per cent. But with so many being launched nightly, dozens of drones have been able to get through.

On the streets of Kyiv Monday afternoon, some were cautiously optimistic after hearing the announcement, but many were skeptical of Trump who has given Putin deadlines before.

"I really hope that these 50 days… will finally be real pressure on Russia.," said Denys Podilchuk, 39, in an interview with Reuters. 

"The fact they are giving Patriots is very good because sitting at night... in the hallways and fearing for your child is not good," said Olena Karpushyna. 

Trump's shift in tone

In recent days, Trump's growing frustration toward Putin was evident by his blunt language. 

He accused the Russian president of spewing "bullsh-t," saying later that Putin "talks nice and then bombs everybody in the evening."

On Monday, while Trump said he was disappointed in Putin and thought there would had been a deal two months ago, he chose his words carefully and didn't lambaste him.

"I don't want to say he's an assassin, but he's a tough guy, " he said, adding that Russia is "potentially such a great country."

While there was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin, Putin has shown no willingness to cede any of his original goals, demanding that peace come on his terms. 

Putin has demanded that Ukraine withdraw its forces from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — the four Ukrainian regions which Russia has laid claim to — and be blocked from ever joining NATO. 

Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher and ultra-nationalist, said on Telegram that Trump's 50-day deadline means that Moscow has a limited window for the "final liberation" of the four regions, and also "preferably Kyiv."

"We have 50 days to finish everything that we haven't finished," he wrote, saying that Trump's threat to impose secondary sanctions on countries that import Russian energy products, like India and China, is serious.

Both countries are major importers of Russian oil, but even the E.U. still relies on Russian gas, which made up 19 per cent of its imports last year. 

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators who have been pushing forward a secondary sanctions bill have been lobbying for a much higher tariff rate of 500 per cent.

Trump gave almost no details about how the sanctions would work and was vague when a reporter asked why he wasn't going with the senators' recommendations. 

Sitting beside Trump throughout the 35-minute news conference, Rutte praised Trump's decision, saying this arrangement allows Europe "to step up" and support Ukraine by purchasing the American weaponry. 

James Black, the deputy director at Rand Europe, a global policy think-tank, said that while European countries have been able to collectively provide more aid than Washington to Ukraine, the U.S provides "many of the most sophisticated and hard-to-replicate military technologies."

Throughout his announcement, Trump repeatedly boasted that the U.S. makes "the best of everything," but he was clear that it wouldn't be Washington paying for the weapons. 

In a bid to assuage some of his supporters who don't want to see tax dollars going to a foreign war, he was adamant that other NATO countries would be paying.