Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin
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President Donald Trump announced this week that the U.S. will send Patriot air-defense missiles to Ukraine and threatened new tariffs on Russia. Will Vladimir Putin back down? What should Trump's next move be? And what does the future hold for Ukraine? Newsweek contributors Daniel R. DePetris and Dan Perry debate:
“Putin will not negotiate as a loser,” one of his longtime associates tells TIME by phone from Moscow. “He knows that winners don’t get punished, and if he wins, all of this” — the sanctions, the tariffs — “will go away.”
It remains to be seen just how lasting and severe President Donald Trump’s turn against Vladimir Putin will be. Trump has criticized the Russian president in unprecedented terms in recent days and signaled he’ll send vital weapons to Ukraine.
If Trump now permits a substantial amount of U.S. weapons to continue to flow to Ukraine, that would mark an important change. Since Trump took office, many in Ukraine and European capitals have thought that might well be the best-case scenario for Ukraine, given the U.S. president's clear hostility to continuing U.S. donations.
President Vladimir Putin believes Russia's economy and its military are strong enough to weather any additional Western measures, sources said.
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New developments Tuesday reinforced the idea that President Donald Trump has significantly shifted his view of the Ukraine war.
On Monday, Trump said that Russia's failure to reach a negotiated settlement with Ukraine within 50 days would lead to his administration imposing a 100% tariff rate on Russian imports as well as what he called "secondary tariffs" on countries that have continued to do business with Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sacrificed an estimated 1 million of his soldiers, killed and wounded, in a three-year campaign to crush Ukraine. Now President Donald Trump is betting that his go-to economic weapon — tariffs — can succeed where Ukrainian drones and rockets haven't,
That included a Monday joint statement from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal calling Trump’s threat of ramped-up economic penalties if Russia doesn’t cut a peace deal in next 50 days “a real executive hammer to drive the parties to the negotiating table.”
Putin’s historic task, as he saw it, was to restore Russia as a major actor on the international stage. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, he approached the West without any deference, reproaching the United States and its allies for “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” that had “caused new human tragedies and created new centers of tension.