Trump announces novel plan to send weapons to Ukraine and gives Russia new deadline to make peace

Taken together, the moves amount to a markedly new approach to the conflict, which Trump has worked to distance himself from since taking office in January. Even as he delivered the announcement from the Oval Office, the president argued he wasn’t to blame for the prolonged war. Still, he appeared entirely fed up with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And he acknowledged American weaponry – however it is delivered – would be necessary if Kyiv is to stave off a full-bore invasion. “I felt we had a deal about four times,” Trump said, referring to a prospective peace agreement with Russia. “But it just kept going on and on.”

The plan the president unveiled Monday – which would see European nations purchase American weapons, then transfer them to Ukraine – has been under discussion for months, ever since Trump won last year’s election and European officials quickly began deliberating on ways to sustain US weapons shipments to Ukraine under a leader who had vowed to pull back American support. Eight months later, the president announced the plan during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office. The president also laid out his new deadline for Russia — threatening trade consequences if no peace deal is reached with Ukraine within 50 days. “We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,” Trump said. “Tariffs at about 100%, you’d call them secondary tariffs. You know what that means.” “I use trade for a lot of things,” Trump said. “But it’s great for settling wars.” A White House official clarified to CNN that when the president referred to “secondary tariffs,” he meant 100% tariffs on Russia and secondary sanctions on other countries that buy Russian oil. The US conducts very little trade with Russia, making the secondary sanctions the piece with potentially the most bite. “They’re secondary sanctions. It’s sanctions on countries that are buying the oil from Russia. So it’s really not about sanctioning Russia,” Matt Whitaker, the US ambassador to NATO, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the White House. “It’s about tariffs on countries like India and China that are buying their oil. It really is going to dramatically impact the Russian economy.” Underpinning the president’s two announcements Monday was his newfound irritation toward Putin, with whom he shares a long and sometimes confounding relationship. Once complimentary of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, Trump appeared angry that his overtures on ending the war have been mostly ignored in Moscow. “My conversations with him are very pleasant, and then the missiles go off at night,” Trump said, even as he denied falling into a trap set for his predecessors: “He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden — he didn’t fool me.”

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