During the 2024 presidential campaign and going back to March 2023, President Trump repeatedly and arrogantly predicted that “he would be able to end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours” upon taking office” on January 20, 2025. Since then, Trump has seriously underestimated Putin’s desire for a negotiated peace with Ukraine.
Since Trump became president, Putin has only escalated his invasion of Ukraine.
As Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) stated on January 19, “Wars can’t be settled by bombast.” It now strongly appears that special peace envoy Steve Witcoff’s negotiations with the Kremlin have risibly failed for the past three months.
To Trump’s great chagrin, Putin greatly embarrassed him on April 24 when Moscow launched a massive eleven-hour attack beginning at 1:00 a.m. involving 70 missiles and 145 drones against Kyiv “in its deadliest assault on the Ukrainian capital since July.” The attack killed twelve people and wounded ninety others in five different neighborhoods.
Trump’s feeble and pathetic response posted on Truth Social later that day, which sounded like Putin was his friend on a first-name basis, unbelievably stated, “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!”
Do you honestly think that Putin gives a damn that 5,000 soldiers on both sides are dying per week? I sincerely doubt it. If Putin had any sons of military age, they would certainly not be fighting in Ukraine.
Trump’s unfortunate statement of “Vladimir, STOP!” was highly reminiscent of Biden’s pitiful comment of “DON’T” at a White House press conference when he warned Iran not to launch any retaliatory strikes against Israel on April 12, 2024. Trump’s reply sounded equally as weak and appeasing.
This spring, the Art of the Deal has failed to work for Trump. I wrote a column on April 28 entitled, “Iran is playing Trump like a Trump.” I could now easily write another one entitled, “Russia is playing Trump like a Chump.”
However, I must admit that Trump has inherited a military mess in Ukraine, and strongly suspect that if he had been president from 2021 to 2025, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine a second time since 2014.
After the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, President Biden and NATO imposed a plethora of economic sanctions against Russia. During the first two years of the war, “Western nations … imposed roughly 2,000 sanctions on Russian companies, banks and individuals in retaliation for the Ukraine invasion.”
Biden imposed another 500 new and ineffective sanctions against Russia after Alexei Navalny‘s death on February 23, 2024. These additional sanctions supposedly affected “Russia’s core financial infrastructure, as well as people and entities in other countries … helping supply Russia with critical technology and equipment, and to evade sanctions.”
Unfortunately, all the sanctions that the U S. and the West imposed upon Russia completely failed during the Biden administration. Old Joe did the equivalent of putting a thick hempen noose around Putin‘s neck, but the hangman never sufficiently tightened it while Putin stood unafraid above the gallows’ closed trap door.
Biden completely failed both to either intimidate or stop Putin because the economic sanctions were simply insufficient among other reasons.
That is because the Kremlin viewed Biden as a weak, cognitively-impaired senescent man, who botched the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and they did not fear him. Likewise, Putin viewed Obama as weak and vacillating for not supporting Ukraine in stopping Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.
As Obama once said about his former vice president, “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k [mess] things up.” Putin, a former KGB agent, psychologically sized up Biden as both a fundamentally timid man and foreign policy screwup, who actually opposed the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011.
So, how has Russia financed its war against Ukraine? The answer is oil revenues generated by using its shadow fleet of old ships that “move[s] Russian crude using methods to hide its origin.”
In February 2024 it was estimated that sanctions had only decreased Russian oil revenues by a mere 40%. Meanwhile, the West tried to maintain a “price cap of $60 a barrel” on crude oil prices in order to drastically reduce the profit margins of Russia’s shadow fleet.
It is painfully obvious that Steve Witkoff ‘s diplomatic negotiations with Putin have failed to reach a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. Trump needs to sanction Russia’s shadow fleet NOW because force is the only deterrent that Putin understands.
Like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya in 2011, he greatly fears domestic political upheaval and potential economic unrest caused by a climbing inflation rate of 10% and interest rates of 21%. This is in addition to an estimated death of 150,000 to 200,000 Russian soldiers, which has been greatly underestimated by Russia’s state-controlled propaganda and disinformation, in what Moscow has euphemistically called its invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.”
More alarmingly, Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, recently stated that the “number of problem loans [in Russia] had grown sharply in the first quarter of 2025 with overdue consumer loans at 16.1 percent of that portfolio.”
NOW is the time for Trump to sanction Putin’s shadow fleet of oil tankers, and bankrupt them or at least cause Moscow severe economic hardship. Right now, Russia is nothing more than one big gas station with a shadow fleet of old oil tankers and nuclear weapons.
Robert L. Maronic