Trump could be running the most incompetent peace process in history
Having just put down the phone on Donald Trump, he launched the biggest air assault on Kyiv since the war began, pounding Ukraine's capital with 550 killer drones and ballistic missiles.
Putin committed this outrage because he has every confidence that Mr Trump will fail to exact any price. True, the American president might compose an angry social media post, but Putin is clearly convinced that nothing more will happen.
Tragically, Mr Trump has given him every reason to believe as much. On Tuesday, America stopped supplying Ukraine with Patriot-3 interceptors, designed to shoot down incoming Russian missiles. Some of these vital defence systems had already been flown across the Atlantic to Poland for onward passage to Ukraine. It seems they will just be sent back again.
With this extraordinary decision, Mr Trump effectively informed Putin that America is content to leave Kyiv defenceless against Russian air attack. Putin responded entirely logically and ordered his biggest assault yet. By withholding the Patriots, Mr Trump gave Putin the greenest light imaginable.
The Kremlin will also have noticed that Mr Trump has not imposed any new US sanctions on Russia since his return to the White House. All sanctions regimes are vulnerable to circumvention: the only response is to update and extend the restrictions, blocking loopholes as they appear, just as Britain and the EU frequently do.
By not passing any new sanctions, Mr Trump is allowing the existing ones to wither on the vine and sending another signal for Putin to do his worst.
The great irony is that a Sanctions Bill that really would crush the Russian economy is ready to go in the Senate, with overwhelming bipartisan support. This measure, proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, a Republican and Democrat respectively, would impose US tariffs of 500 per cent on any country foolish enough to buy Putin's oil or gas. It can pass whenever the president gives the word.
But there is no sign that Mr Trump will give the word. He occasionally threatens and blusters. On May 28, the president claimed that he would know 'within two weeks' whether Putin was 'tapping us along'. Five weeks have passed and all that Mr Trump has done is deprive Ukraine of vital defences. Putin has obviously concluded that the Sanctions Bill will never pass no matter what he does.
Now there are only two possibilities. Mr Trump could be running the most cack-handed and incompetent peace process in history, based on asking Putin to lay off or else America will stop helping his enemy. What kind of a negotiating position is that? Or else Mr Trump thinks that the only route to peace is for Russia to achieve the total defeat and conquest of Ukraine as rapidly as possible.
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