Carl P. Leubsdorf: Trump’s problems in determining Putin’s desire for peace

For a quarter century, nearly every American president had made the same mistake, treating Russian leader Vladimir Putin as someone who shares the U.S. interest in a safer, more predictable world.

Add President Donald Trump to the list.

For months, he has talked of how his friendship with Putin would enable him to settle the war in Ukraine. He repeatedly pressured Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to meet with Putin.

But the Russian leader rebuffed his outreach, inflicting ever greater aerial destruction on Ukraine in hopes of forcing its surrender. Last week, after their sixth phone call as president, Trump acknowledged it “didn’t make any progress” in resolving the conflict.

“I’m not happy about that,” he said.

Several days later, he unloaded on the Russian president.

• “We get a lot of … thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters. “He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

On Monday, he authorized substantial new arms shipments to Ukraine – via our European allies – while insisting he had not been fooled by the Russian dictator.

“He fooled a lot of people,” Trump said. “He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden – he didn’t fool me.”

Part of Trump’s problem is that he mistakenly blames what happened under his predecessors on their weakness and incompetence – rather than on Putin.

Still, it’s true that, since Boris Yeltsin tapped Putin as his successor in 1999, every American president but Joe Biden has expressed the rosy belief that the former KGB agent is – as Margaret Thatcher famously said of former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev – “a man one could do business with.”

Each, in turn, has been disappointed.

Some of it stems from Putin’s disdain of the 1994 Budapest pact that President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major signed with Yeltsin.

In return for Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan giving up their nuclear weapons, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom agreed not to threaten or use military force or economic coercion against the three former Soviet republics.

In 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreed to expand into Eastern Europe, admitting Poland, Czechia and Hungary as members. Yeltsin opposed it and, in later years, Putin cited NATO expansion for his resort to more aggressive policies.

“I know Boris agreed to go along with you and John Major and NATO,” Clinton has said Putin told him in a private 2011 conversation. “I don’t agree with it, and I do not support it, and I’m not bound by it.”

Meanwhile, Clinton’s successors kept waxing optimistic about the relationship.

In 2001, after President George W. Bush met Putin in Slovenia, he said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.”

From that promising start, however, their relations went all downhill, exacerbated by Bush’s decision to press the NATO expansion and Putin’s decision to send in Russian troops to quell a 2008 uprising in the independent republic of Georgia.

When Barack Obama became president in 2009, he vowed to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations. For a time, they improved, including negotiation of a new arms reduction treaty in 2010 between Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, who had succeeded Putin as president.

In a 2012 campaign debate, Obama scoffed when his Republican rival, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, called Russia “without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

“The Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama responded.

But his advisors later conceded Romney was right after Putin, regaining the presidency, seized the Ukrainian province of Crimea in 2014 and incorporated it into Russia. The West expelled Russia from the Group of Eight’s annual economic summits and applied economic sanctions but did nothing to reverse Putin’s action militarily.

In 2019, Trump threatened to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless it reopened a probe of Biden in the infamous phone call that led to his impeachment.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden, citing his multiple dealings with Putin over the years, accurately characterized the Russian president’s goals.

“Putin has one overriding objective: To break NATO, to weaken the Western alliance and to further diminish our ability to compete in the Pacific by working out something with China,” he told CNN’s Gloria Borger. “And it’s not going to happen on my watch.”

It was on Biden’s watch that Russia, in February 2022, invaded Ukraine, launching the unprovoked war that continues to this day.

Though Biden promptly organized Western help for Ukraine, Trump blamed him for the war, contending Russia would never have dared invade had he been president. And he repeatedly claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could settle the war within a day of becoming president – if not sooner.

“I don’t have to wait until Jan. 20th (Inauguration Day),” Trump vowed. “I’m going to try and get it done sooner than that.”

When events moved slowly, he blamed Zelenskyy’s recalcitrance, accusing him at an acrimonious White House meeting of “gambling with World War III.”

But it has become increasingly evident that Putin doesn’t yet want an agreement, prompting the latest Trump tack. Besides providing Ukraine weapons, Trump said he would give Putin 50 days to come to the table – or face “very severe tariffs.”

Beyond peace for embattled Ukraine, Trump may have something more personal at stake: his hopes for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But that may depend on his doing something that has flummoxed every president: making an accurate reading of Putin.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.