Donald Trump Says Vladimir Putin Has 'Gone Absolutely CRAZY'
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After days of Russian aerial strikes on Ukraine, President Trump toughens his rhetoric toward Vladimir Putin, including saying he's gone crazy and is playing with fire. Meantime, Senator Lindsey Graham lines up 82 Senate co-sponsors for a sanctions bill that would put tough penalties on buyers of Russian oil, natural gas and other products.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues, columnist Joe Sternberg and editorial board member Jillian Melcher, both calling in today from London. Dozens of civilians have reportedly been killed over the past week by Russian bombardment. What the Ukrainian Armed Forces estimate is about 1,400 drones and nearly 100 missiles aimed at targets all across the country.

That prompted the president on Sunday night to stiffen his approach toward this, saying on Truth Social, I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely crazy. He is needlessly killing lots of people. And I'm not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever. What?

Let's listen to a bit of the president speaking with reporters on Sunday in front of Marine One. I'm not happy with what Putin's doing. He's killing a lot of people and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin. I've known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he's sending rockets.

On Tuesday, Trump followed up with this on Truth Social, saying what Vladimir Putin doesn't realize is that if it weren't for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia. And I mean really bad, adding that, quote, he's playing with fire, unquote.

Joe, what do you make of this rhetorical turn, particularly given shooting rockets into cities in Ukraine is something that Putin has been doing for well more than a week? I am actually going to resist the temptation to mock Trump for having come to the startling realization after only a

20 plus years that Vladimir Putin has been in charge in various forms in Russia, that Putin might not have the best interests of the rest of the world at heart. And instead, I think that one way that you can interpret this is that Trump clearly all along has been

sort of burdened by the impression that he is the master dealmaker would have been better equipped than any other American president and particularly more so than Joe Biden to negotiate some kind of end to this war in Ukraine. And he's also been surrounded by advisors who were

whispering in his ear that really at the end of the day, the situation was entirely Ukraine's fault and the path to peace. Iran through the Kremlin, trying to come up with some kind of accommodation with Vladimir Putin, who ultimately is a reasonable man. And my interpretation of what we've had over the weekend is sort of a scales falling from the eyes moment. It might be cross your fingers, dare to hope.

that Trump is realizing that Putin is not, in fact, an honest broker when it comes to trying to resolve the situation. And Trump is discovering that, you know, a consequence of his softly, softly approach with regard to Putin over the past couple months has been that he is encouraging the Kremlin to become even more aggressive instead of providing an off-ramp for Putin to try to negotiate himself out of a war that apparently he doesn't want to get out

of. Jillian, what's the latest on the ground? It's been a while since we've talked on the podcast about the Ukraine war. Is Russia still making some grinding gains? It's offensive there. Yeah. So grinding is the right word for it. I think what Putin has been doing is throwing just a ton of manpower at the Eastern Front to create a perception in the West that Russian victory is inevitable and

But this is at an extraordinary cost, both in terms of men and material. And it is pretty tough to advance there. I mean, Ukraine's drone warfare makes it so that once you get up to that line of contact, trouble is coming down on the Russians from the sky. And so it's been small, marginal grinding advances, question of how long Russia can sustain that.

But I also think Putin feels pretty emboldened by what he's seen so far from the Trump administration. I mean, we talked about these enormous missile strikes over the past couple of days, but I was looking back at the statistics

since Trump's inauguration. And you're seeing 15,126 drone strikes that are real and decoy drones, but that drains Ukraine's air defenses, 440 missile strikes. And then you've also seen the Russians up in the north. They would love to take Kharkiv, haven't had really the manpower to launch something serious there. But in Sumy,

Just on the opposite side in Kursk region, they've driven the Ukrainians out and are now trying to capitalize on that momentum and launching a limited offensive, but still an offensive in Sumy. Pushing, pushing, trying to get marginal gains where they can. And I think they're probing, seeing what they can get away with in Ukraine. And the question for the Trump administration is, if you don't like this killing, if you want it to stop, what are you prepared to do?

And that's something we haven't really seen an answer to yet, but maybe we will soon. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

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Welcome back. Jillian, a related question. One of the things that has helped Ukrainians defenders is U.S. weapons, including Patriot missiles, defending the skies there. There were some concerns about the Ukrainians running short on many of those munitions. The U.S. has been sporadically resupplying them. Where does that conversation stand right now? Yeah, so this is a thing to be concerned about. So under Ukraine,

the US current aid Ukraine set to run out. And there's some disagreements about when that is. It could be a couple of weeks.

could be later toward the end of the summer. But the question kind of doesn't make a difference unless the U.S. is going to make more, because the signal to Putin is if the U.S. isn't prepared to provide additional aid, Putin can wait this out and seize Ukraine, basically. Things that are promising, I think you have seen the Europeans increase production of 155-millimeter artilleries. They're in a better situation to provide more

But Ukraine is still really reliant on the U.S. It needs that artillery, so it's not rationing. It's very reliant on the U.S. for its air defenses, as you mentioned. Patriot's pretty much the only thing that can take down a ballistic missile. It's lost some of its F-16s, so important to get those back for protecting its skies. But I will say one thing to keep an eye on, and we're still not quite sure how this is going to shake out.

But that mineral deal between the U.S. and Ukraine reached last month creates the possibility of the U.S. providing additional aid. This would be done as a sale. So it would end up on this ledger between U.S. and Ukraine investments into the mineral fund. But it does sort of open up that possibility in a way that could be more palatable to the Trump constituency. So we'll see what happens with that. Yeah.

that. If Trump is changing his tack toward Putin here, one question is what that might look like. And Joe, notably, there's a sanctions bill that has been circulating in the Senate where the provisions would be 500 percent tariffs on

on countries that are buying Russian oil, uranium, other materials like that. Let's listen to one of the sponsors of that, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, making the argument for it on the Senate floor last week. What can we do in the United States Senate to change the equation? What can we do to persuade Russia to get to the peace table?

We can impose bone-crushing sanctions on Putin's Russia, and he has earned that. I hate it for the Russian people.

But it is now time to increase the cost of this war to Putin. Joe, maybe those kinds of sanctions were what Trump was referring to today when he said that bad things would be happening if not for me. But what do you make of this kind of sanctions approach? The difficulty is often in the details of how this is going to be enforced and whether the administration will follow through with that.

Well, Kyle, I think there's a practical dimension here and then a political dimension. So the practical dimension is getting, I think, one of the straw men that you were hearing from the more isolationist crowd in the administration and sort of in the

conservative orbit in the US right now is this argument that really we have got to end this conflict in any way with any concessions to Putin that we have to offer because the alternative is putting US boots on the ground and that would be absolutely intolerable and we don't want to be involved in another forever war.

And so I think that one important practical point to extract from the sanctions debate is that actually there is an enormous middle ground between that scenario of having to put U.S. or even other NATO boots on the ground in the middle of a hot,

war between Russia and Ukraine on the one hand, and completely washing our hands of this and walking away and leaving Ukraine to fate on the other end. And so I think that one point that you can draw from the sanctions legislation is that there is

more scope to apply economic pressure to Putin and the Kremlin. And, you know, Putin's circle within Russia, which I think are often targets for these sanctions, there are a lot of things that the West can still do, far short of having to commit our own troops to this conflict. And if we can do those things, we should be thinking seriously about doing it.

I think that the related political point is that despite this impression that the isolationists are in the ascendant in the Trump administration, the fact that so many Republicans in the Senate support this bill and that it is being co-sponsored by some prominent Republicans, that it has such a long list of bipartisan co-sponsors, I think is a strong signal

both to the Trump administration and to the Kremlin and to the rest of the world, that sort of some of these isolationist noises that you hear from the Trump administration are not aligned with where the American public might be and where the rest of the American political system is on this issue. And that actually there is support in Washington for a tougher line and for exploring a bunch of the options that we have

Again, short of putting boots on the ground, which I don't think anyone is seriously talking about at the moment, that can still exert American pressure to benefit our allies and ourselves in terms of deterring Putin and bringing the war to a close.

Yeah, I'll just add to that. You know, when you talk to Ukrainians, they don't want American boots on the ground. They don't want Western boots on the ground. They say, you know, this is our fight and we're willing to fight it. Just give us the arms because we can't do it without that. What's your read of this sanctions debate, though, Jillian? Maybe Republicans have been holding off on passing this bill for now because they wanted to let President Trump have the room that he said he wanted.

For these negotiations during the campaign, he said he would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, maybe even before he took office. Lately, he's been saying that that was said in jest. It was another signal that voters were supposed to take seriously and not literally, I guess.

But remarkable to have 82 co-sponsors on a Senate bill. 82 people in the Senate probably couldn't agree on a bill about apple pie or something like that. So should Republicans quit waiting for President Trump? Maybe Trump is making his own rhetorical turn here and would support the sanctions bill shortly if there's not any sort of breakthrough negotiations.

But the other alternative is that Republicans could schedule it and have a vote and pass it. Yeah, you're absolutely right on that. And I think that the way to look at this is not like a rebellion against the Trump negotiating position. It's actually giving Trump more leverage to negotiate, giving him more runway, because so far we've seen a lot of potential carrots offered to Russia, you know, improved trade relations,

There was even talk of like a hockey delegation coming over. But you need some sticks as well. And sanctions are a really good stick. Herms are the best stick, I think. But on top of that, I mean, a thing that we haven't even really touched on, Russia has a lot of foreign reserves abroad. Europe's been pretty hesitant to touch those. Most of them have been located in Europe.

But it is a potential thing that the Trump administration could encourage Europe to do is take those reserves, help pay for Ukraine to continue fighting its war with Russian assets or use those funds to help rebuild Ukraine when there's a peace. I think moves like that incrementally could put a lot of pressure and get Putin convinced that he'd better come to the negotiating table and get serious.

because right now we're just seeing delaying and stalling tactics. And that ultimately benefits Russia because it is the bigger and better armed country. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. ADP imagines a world of work where smart machines become too smart. Copier, I need 15 copies of this. Printing. By the way, irregardless, not a word, Janet. Yeah, I know. Page six should be regardless of or irrespective of. Just print them, please.

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Welcome back. Those delaying and stalling tactics, also something that Trump has brought up himself saying lately that maybe Vladimir Putin is just trying to string him along, which is, Joe, kind of how I read this lengthy negotiation. But what about the question of long-term U.S. posture and particularly resupplying those weapons if Ukrainian's defenders start to run short of them here shortly? I mean, it does seem like that

would be a real choice point for the new Trump administration. Because one thing that you could see happen is President Trump say, fine, we can't negotiate. We can't get a peace deal. We're going to walk away from this. The U.S. is not going to be involved in that.

That might be the kind of approach that you could see somebody like Vice President J.D. Vance advocating for inside the White House. He gave a commencement speech last week talking about the end of the unilateral American era, that this is a clear change.

in approach by the Trump administration that the president laid out in Saudi Arabia. This is, according to the vice president, a change in policy over decades where we're no longer going to be involved in things abroad that aren't clearly in the U.S. interest, again, according to J.D. Vance. But Joe, maybe there are some more hawkish people inside the White House as well who would make the counter argument that

supplying these weapons is a relatively low-cost effort for the United States in the grand scheme of the Pentagon budget and the U.S. budget overall, and it's keeping Russia tied up and not on the doorstep of NATO. Look, I think what's going on is that within the administration, there seems to be a crew that think that what they are avoiding is another Afghanistan, you know, another of these very long wars that

begins for a good reason, and then it drags on for such a long time at such great cost that by the end of it, you have forgotten what you were even doing there in the first place. You know, sort of like the Dickens novel. You know, that clearly is the impulse behind the way that J.D. Vance thinks of the world and America's role in it. Now, the problem is that what they have got to be careful about avoiding is Afghanistan in the sense of the disastrous

Biden withdrawal that signaled to friend and foe alike that America was just sort of unilaterally pulling itself away from the world and was going to be unconcerned about the consequences, and that actually emboldened a lot of bad actors, including one Vladimir Putin, who within a year after that Afghanistan withdrawal by the Biden administration had launched his own invasion of Ukraine.

So I think that, you know, Kyle, you've really hit on the important point here. I mean, one of the things I find so puzzling, we have this opportunity where we have allies in Europe who we can rally, who increasingly over the past few years have come to understand that they have big stakes in what happens in this war on their doorstep.

and are increasingly committed to putting their own treasure, their own military supplies and financial backing into the effort. So we have the opportunity to rally them. We have the opportunity to supply a country, Ukraine, that wants to keep fighting for itself.

And it has a bunch of the institutions that it would need to be able to do that. And why would we be so quick to pull back under those circumstances? I think that the folks in the J.D. Vance camp

within the administration have to be mindful of not recreating that second Afghanistan disaster out of their zeal to avoid what they think was the problem of the first Afghanistan issue. I would echo that point, I guess. I get that there is dissatisfaction among many voters about

the cost of funding these munitions that we're sending over. But I think those polls could also change pretty quickly if the Ukrainians run out of Patriots, for example. And then but for those Patriots, more of these Russian missiles and drones are getting through and hitting city centers and causing more civilian casualties.

Notable also that, again, I take the argument that Europe can step up more, but here's a story in the last day or so from Politico Europe. Germany and its key allies have lifted range restrictions on weapons sent to Ukraine, allowing Kyiv to hit targets inside Russia with no external limits, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday. That could clear the path, again, according to this news story, to deliver Taurus cruise missiles to Kyiv.

And so, Jillian, I mean, those arguments taken, it does seem like there are efforts in Europe to fill some of those supply gaps. And as dissatisfied as many voters in the U.S. are with Europe's inability to immediately have the industrial capacity to fill the weapons that the U.S. has been sending over, I also don't know that voters would particularly like the alternative if the U.S. simply cut off those supplies.

Yeah, you're absolutely right on that. I mean, so I'm tracking those Mertz comments too, and I found them really interesting. Now would be a great time for Germany to hand over those long range missiles, because that is another way that Ukraine can put pressure on Russia. Now, one thing to keep an eye on with this is lifting the restrictions is important. Ukraine, however, when it's conducting these longer range strikes, it really relies on U.S. help on intelligence and targeting.

So that's a thing to keep an eye on. You could provide the missiles, could remove the restrictions. But without U.S. help, pulling this off is going to be tough. And I don't think we have a lot of clarity of how willing the Trump administration is to continue doing that. We've already seen intelligence briefly suspended. It's not totally clear what this current state of it is. But again, a step in the right direction for Europe in terms of stepping up.

I think you're completely right on how quickly public opinion could change. I mean, I'm thinking back in the early days of the war in Ukraine, just the horrific sites that we saw in Buta and Irpin, just outside of Kiev. If you're in the car, it's about as far of a drive from downtown Manhattan to JFK, and you saw bodies littered on the street. Horrific.

horrific signs of torture on many of the people. And then you're starting to see these missile strikes, some of the largest packages that Russia has launched at Ukraine. And the stories there are heartbreaking. I mean, you've seen missile strikes on buses with children in them. You've seen missile strikes, you know, one just within the last month or so where it wiped out pretty much an entire family, young teenage girl buried in the rubble surviving just at

crushing bit of footage. And I think that's the sort of thing that, you know, Americans may not be paying attention to the minutia of spending packages on defense. But when images like that coming out of Ukraine become more frequent, it may swing public opinion. There's another point to make about the public opinion.

Thank you.

trivial compared to the size of the overall federal budget. And, you know, even relative to the U.S. defense budget, we are not talking outrageous sums of money. So I think that, you know, the politics of that can also change.

The more politicians are prepared to get up there and make an argument to the American people who are definitely smart enough to understand this once people lay it out for them, that what we are getting for this relatively modest outlay is incredibly cheap, the price. I mean, basically what we are trying to buy with this aid is

is a situation where Putin is deterred from any further aggression against NATO allies where the U.S. would have treaty obligations to step in. And that becomes very expensive very quickly. So I think that a big part of the politics here

is just having politicians who are prepared to get up and explain to the Americans that although at first the dollar figures might sound big, they aren't, especially relative to what we potentially get in exchange. Julian, we'll give you the last word, but a couple of thoughts just jumping off of that. One thing that this aid is also intended to do is to prevent a Russian breakthrough, an overrunning of the Ukrainian lines, maybe Russia,

Putin back at threatening Kiev, maybe taking over the entire country. And then two, on the question of deterrence, I think it's also supposed to send a message of U.S. seriousness to other adversaries around the globe, including Xi Jinping in China, who is watching what's happening and how this Ukrainian invasion is playing out as he's thinking about Taiwan in the next few years.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think that when I'm talking to Ukrainians, they're looking at things like the giant prisoner exchange that just happened. You've got men coming back from years of captivity who are gaunt, who are bearing signs of torture, and their families are looking at these men saying, if Russia wins, is this what's going to happen to our entire family? You see these horrific stories coming out of occupied territory about just Russian brutality. And I think that that has...

really motivated Ukrainians to keep fighting with or without U.S. arms. But you can see that collapsing. It's

scary to think about what will happen if the U.S. doesn't continue providing arms and if Russia is able to gain some of that momentum. For sure, Xi Jinping is watching this. He's already, I think, tempted to do something like launch a blockade, seize one of the outlying islands. You've seen an increase around Taiwan of military drills that U.S. officials are saying it's a rehearsal. It's not just...

something that they're doing for fun. This is rehearsing a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. So I think that Xi Jinping is watching and seeing if Putin can get away with this. And if Putin can, in fact, get away with this, what's to say China can't? Thank you, Jillian and Joe. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.

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