Trump says Putin wants peace. Moscow illustrates this with more bombings

According to US President Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin would rather have a peace deal than Volodymyr Zelensky. The statement was quoted by Sky News, and it came on the same day that the Russian army, despite the “energy ceasefire” announced by the American president, continued to bomb Ukraine's energy system.

When reporters asked Trump what he thought of the Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, he replied that he still had to look into what had happened, since both sides had committed violations. Asked how he would get Putin to abide by the ceasefire, he turned the focus directly to Kyiv instead: in his view, Putin wants a deal, and it's Zelensky who needs to be persuaded to want one too. When reporters reminded him that Russia was meanwhile continuing its attacks, he again avoided criticizing the Kremlin, saying he believed a deal would be reached because Putin wants it more than Zelensky does. If one didn't know it was an American president speaking, one could easily mistake it for an editorial in Moscow's Pravda.

How much truth there is to the claim that “both sides committed violations” was shown fairly clearly by the first two days of the ceasefire. On Monday, at the security policy forum in Warsaw, Zelensky said that Kyiv had been caught off guard by Trump's social media announcement that attacks on energy facilities would stop immediately. A few hours after the announcement, Russia struck a power plant in Kharkiv. During the night, Ukrainian forces deliberately refrained from attacking Russian refineries, yet on Monday morning Russian drones struck Kyiv. Overnight into Sunday, according to the Ukrainian air force, 121 Shahed-type drones were launched against Ukraine, killing at least ten people in the attacks. Zelensky said that this was, for now, Putin's response to Trump: Russian attacks. Kyiv has stressed that it is ready to observe the ceasefire if Moscow does too, and expects Washington to specify what concrete steps it will take to ensure that Russia also complies.

Just how much Putin wants peace was made clear on Monday by the Kremlin itself. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected Zelensky's proposal for a full sixty-day ceasefire, which would have allowed Ukrainian elections to be held. He said that Putin and other Russian leaders have repeatedly stated that they do not want a ceasefire, only a “lasting peace” — which in the Kremlin's vocabulary typically means Ukraine's capitulation. So Putin, supposedly more eager for peace than Zelensky, managed within a single day both to reject a full ceasefire and to violate the partial one that Trump had announced on his behalf as well. Meanwhile, according to the Kyiv Independent and the Financial Times, Washington is threatening not Moscow but Kyiv, warning that it will halt intelligence cooperation and arms deliveries if Ukrainian drones continue to strike Russian refineries. The same administration has also allowed imports of Russian diesel, a move criticized by European allies and several Republican senators as violating Congress's 2022 ban on imports of Russian energy resources.

Trump's statements are not isolated slips but part of a consistent pattern. The American president is repeating, almost word for word, what Kremlin propaganda has been saying for years: that the aggressor longs for peace while the attacked party is stubborn and unwilling to make concessions. On the same day, he also claimed that, in his view, Russia and China are not helping Iran because they have too much to lose — even though plenty of evidence points to the opposite, and the case of the Russian financial network known as A7 has just shown that Moscow's infrastructure serves Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Hamas alike. The biggest beneficiary of the “both sides are to blame” narrative is always the one who started the war and who keeps sending its drones out to kill again every night. And Putin could hardly wish for a better spokesman than the President of the United States, who, free of charge and before the world's largest audience, says on his behalf exactly what Pravda has been printing for years.

Opinion