President Donald Trump escalated his criticism of Russia on Sunday, after weeks of being accused of siding with Vladimir Putin in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
According to Welker, the US president called NBC’s Kristen Welker before her appearance as host of Meet the Press on Sunday. He told her that he was “p***ed off” after the Russian president called for Ukrainian elections and questioned the legitimacy of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, comments that the US president deemed unhelpful.
Despite the fact that US negotiators are currently in Saudi Arabia moderating peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials, Donald Trump blamed Putin squarely on Sunday, saying he was “very angry” with the Russian president. Putin stated that his recent comments about Zelensky were “not going in the right direction.”
The president also threatened to raise tariffs on Russian energy exports if a deal could not be reached due to interference or delays from Moscow.
The Trump administration has recently imposed tariffs on a number of countries, including Canada and Mexico, in an effort to force international policy concessions through trade action.
“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” said President Trump to NBC News.
“That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States,” according to him. “There will be a 25 percent tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”
Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine come three years after Putin’s full-scale invasion began, and hundreds of thousands have died in the conflict, including over 12,000 Ukrainian civilians.
This past week, State Department officials told reporters that funding had been restored for a program run by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab to document and track nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children believed to have been kidnapped by Russian forces during the invasion. The program had initially lost funding due to Elon Musk-led DOGE spending cuts, but it was reinstated following a bipartisan outcry.
Plans for a broader peace agreement to end the three-year period of open warfare are still far off, and US officials have warned that both Ukraine and Russia will need to make concessions before a deal can be signed.
It is still unclear whether the Trump administration intends to force Ukrainian recognition of Russia’s control over Crimea, but it appears likely that Ukraine will be forced to abandon its bid to join NATO, a goal supported by the previous US president.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump touted his relationship with Putin and dealmaking abilities as reasons why he could end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in “24 hours” if elected president.
The slow pace of peace talks appears to have irritated the Republican president, whose rage was previously evident when he and Vice President JD Vance angrily berated Zelensky in the White House in an ambush-style confrontation in front of news cameras. He also referred to Zelensky as a “dictator” on Truth Social.
That deterioration in US-Ukraine relations resulted in the termination of talks aimed at granting American buyers access to rare earth mineral deposits in Kyiv, which the Trump administration has portrayed as its own kind of security guarantee for Ukraine’s future, based on the assumption that Russian officials would think twice before threatening US economic assets.
It was reported this week that Trump’s latest push aims to secure a deal to repay Ukrainian war debt through royalties on Ukrainian energy sales, including oil and gas.
