US President Donald Trump seemed to establish a two -week deadline for Vladimir Putin, threatening a different response if the Russian counterpart would still lead him.
On Wednesday, the Kremlin intensified its attacks on Ukraine, Trump was questioned in the oval office if he thought Putin wanted to end the war.
“I can’t tell you, but I will let you know about two weeks,” Trump told journalists, the last one in the middle of a series of critical public remarks made by Trump about Putin.
Since Sunday, Trump has written several articles on social networks saying that Putin has become “absolutely crazy” and “plays with fire” after Russia intensified its attacks against Ukraine.
The bombings by Russia have been among the most important and deadliest attacks since the start of the war, now in its fourth year.
The Russian strikes in kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, killed at least 13 people and injured dozens of others, including children, during the weekend.
And Wednesday, the attacks had shown no signs of slowdown.
In Trump’s remarks on the escalation of violence and if he thinks that Putin is serious to end the war, Trump said: “I will let you know in about two weeks.
“Within two weeks. We will find out whether (Putin is) relying or not.
“And if it is, we will answer a little differently.”
Comments are a sign of Trump’s growing frustration, as the repeated efforts of the White House to negotiate an agreement between Russia and Ukraine seem more and more futile.
This includes a recent Two -hour telephone call Between Trump and Putin, after which the American president said that the discussions went “very well”.
Putin moved away from the call saying that he was ready to work with Ukraine on a “memorandum on a possible future peace agreement”.
This call took place a week before Russia launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles to the Ukrainian capital, according to Ukraine Air Force.
And a memorandum has not yet been produced by Russia.
Until now, Trump’s threats did not seem enough concerned in Moscow to make it condet in his requests. Trump did not say such previous threats.
Since his entry into office, Trump has only taken measures against Ukraine, while Washington sought to orient the countries at the request of Trump’s truce.
This included an eight -day suspension of American military aid and intelligence sharing with kyiv in March.
Meanwhile, the American administration has not publicly demanded significant concessions from Russia.
The White House rejects the accusations of eating Moscow or not applying its will, stressing that all the sanctions of the Biden era remain in force against Russia.
But so far, his mediation approach seems to have made the Kremlin more, no less, authorized.
After the last attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “something happened” to Putin, who, according to the Kremlin “Connected to emotional overload”.
The attacks of Russia against Ukraine continued in the days after. Trump then intensified his review. On Tuesday, he said that Putin “played with fire” and that “many bad things” would have happened to Russia if it was not for the involvement of Trump.
Help at the Kremlin responded to Trump Truth’s latest social position saying: “We have come to the conclusion that Trump is not sufficiently informed of what is really going on.”
Putin helps Yury Ushakov told the Russian state television channel that Trump had to ignore “increasingly frequent massive terrorist attacks, Ukraine puts peaceful Russian cities”.
Wednesday, the new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine that Berlin will help Kyiv produce long -range missiles defend yourself against the Russian attack.
The Kremlin warned that any decision to put an end to the restrictions on the scope on the missiles that Ukraine can use would be a dangerous change in policy that would affect efforts to achieve a political agreement.
Faced with Russia’s recalcitrance, Trump frequently softened his requests, taking the emphasis on his initial call to an immediate 30-day ceasefire, to which only Ukraine accepted, to more recently demand a summit with Putin to obtain what he says is a breakthrough.
Putin and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, increased their requests for previous posts since the United States restored contacts with the Russians in February.
These have included a request that Ukraine gives in certain parts of its own country which is not even occupied by Russia and that the United States recognizes Crimea as an official part of Russia.
Michael McFaul, a former American ambassador to Moscow, calls this a “poison pill” introduced by Russia: the creation of conditions that kyiv could never accept in order to replace Ukraine in Trump’s eyes.
The war won tens of thousands of lives and left a large part of the east and southern Ukraine in ruins. Moscow controls approximately one fifth of the country’s territory, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
Zelensky accused Moscow of delaying the peace process and said they had not yet delivered a promised peace memoir after talks in Istanbul. Peskov insisted that the document was in its “final stages”.
