Well, I guess we didn’t have to wait fifty days to find out what the Russians intend to do with Donald Trump’s demands. They’ve told us already. How to say, “Go blow it out your a$$,” without saying go blow it out your a$$? No, the Putin/Trump bromance is over and Russia intends to attack Ukraine until their goals of permanent control of key territories of Ukraine and permanently blocking Ukraine’s entry into NATO are achieved. That’s as simple as it gets. So what is dummy Donald going to do about that? Oh, he’s not worried about Russia’s tariffs or Russia generally, because everything is going so well.
Trump: The tariffs coming in by the hundreds of billions of dollars, they are really at the infant stage right now. It is only on cars and steel mostly. The rest is starting to kick in. pic.twitter.com/y6JT9vUVYt
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 15, 2025
That’s Trump’s version of reality and here is Russia’s version.
“In response to President Trump’s threat to impose 100% secondary tariffs on countries that do business with Russia if Putin’s government does not agree to a deal to end the war in that timeframe, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Tuesday that ‘any attempts to make demands, especially ultimatums, are unacceptable to us,’ according to Russia’s state-run TASS news agency,” CBS News reported.
“If we cannot achieve our goals through diplomacy,” Ryabkov added, “then the SVO (war in Ukraine) will continue… This is an unshakable position. We would like Washington and NATO as a whole to take it with the utmost seriousness.”
On Monday, Trump effectively tanked a bipartisan Senate bill that would have imposed a 500% tariff on nations doing business with Russia, saying he did not believe it was necessary, although he would not oppose it. Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune pulled the bill.
“Trump’s Russia announcement is being portrayed as toughening his stance,” wrote The New York Times’ Peter Baker, “but in fact what he did was give Putin a 50-day free pass to do anything he likes in Ukraine without further US punishment as the Senate sanctions bill is now put on hold.”
“Moreover,” he added, “the Russians have paid attention and realize that Trump deadlines tend to be less than firm so they have already indicated that they don’t take this one all that seriously.”
And on Tuesday, providing Russia with more good news, Trump said he did not think Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should be targeting Moscow with missiles.
“Ukraine shouldn’t target Moscow even though Moscow targets Kyiv every day, and the U.S. is not looking to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov. “Everyone in the Kremlin who thought for a few hours that Trump may be serious about pressure on Russia is popping champagne.”
Trump’s a joke. He can’t bluff Putin. Trump did have a conversation with Zelensky, “Volodymyr, can you target Moscow?” and Zelensky assured him that he could, with the right missiles. Trump won’t provide them. Trump, who was going to end all this on Day One, is going to be impotent and stupid for the rest of his term and then a Democrat will take over and get us out of this mess. And Putin knows all this. He’s known it all for quite some time.
