Trump pledges Patriot missiles for Ukraine amid growing frustration with Putin — Novaya Gazeta Europe
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Washington would provide Kyiv with additional Patriot air defence systems amid his growing frustration with Vladimir Putin.
'We will send them Patriots, which they desperately need, because Putin really surprised a lot of people,' Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, outside Washington. 'He talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening'.
'So, there's a little bit of a problem there. I don't like it,' Trump said of Russia's continued aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities in defiance of US calls for a ceasefire.
The US would also send other pieces of 'very sophisticated' military equipment to Ukraine through NATO, with European countries to pay '100% for them', Trump added.
On Thursday, Washington partially resumed arms and munition shipments to Kyiv, just days after the Trump administration suspended the supply of key weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Later that day, Trump said in an interview with NBC News that he was 'disappointed' with Russia and that he planned to make a 'major statement' on the war in Ukraine on Monday during a visit to Washington by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
On Sunday, Axios reported that Trump would announce an 'aggressive' plan to arm Ukraine on Monday, which would include supplying Kyiv with offensive weapons in a significant shift of the Trump administration's policy on the conflict.
According to two unnamed diplomatic sources, among those weapons would be 'long-range missiles that could reach targets deep inside Russian territory, including Moscow', Axios said.
Russia has escalated its aerial attacks on Ukraine in recent months, killing and injuring more Ukrainian civilians in June than in any other month since the initial period of its full-scale invasion in spring 2022, according to a UN report.
Following one of Russia's deadliest attacks on Kyiv of the war so far on 17 June, in which 28 people were killed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said large-scale Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities had become increasingly common since Trump took office in January, with Moscow emboldened to 'ramp up' its attacks as it faced 'no new consequences' from the West.
According to Axios, Trump has become increasingly exasperated with Putin amid those continued attacks and Russia's resistance to a US-brokered ceasefire, with a call with the Russian leader earlier this month — in which Putin insisted Russia would 'not give up on its goals' in the war — reportedly convincing the US president to arm Ukraine.
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Skipping out. Putin's decision not to travel to this month's BRICS summit in Brazil was driven by more than fear of arrest — Novaya Gazeta Europe
Brazil's decision to host the 17th annual meeting of the BRICS forum in Rio de Janeiro earlier this month, just eight months after the grouping's last meeting in the Russian city of Kazan, appeared to backfire when neither Chinese President Xi Jinping nor Russian leader Vladimir Putin attended the event in person. While Xi's absence — his first since 2012 — was officially attributed to a 'scheduling conflict', it was widely believed that the guest of honour status being accorded to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the real reason the Chinese president chose to stay away. By contrast, the International Criminal Court's indictment of Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine almost certainly played a role in his decision not to attend the event in person, despite Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's assurances that Brasilia would not act on the arrest warrant, despite Brazil's legal obligation to do so. Putin's absence was notable as he usually relishes any opportunity to thumb his nose at the 'collective West' and to lay bare its failure to totally isolate Russia from the international community, and yet he clearly felt that travelling to Brazil was too risky at this time. Though the flight from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro would have required him to transit the airspace of multiple ICC member states, arguably the real reason for Putin's reluctance to make the journey was the prospect of Ukrainian foul play, following a spate of successful attacks and targeted assassinations by Ukrainian intelligence agencies. Though Moscow sees the Trump administration's episodic halting of military aid to Ukraine and its frustration at what it perceives as the freeloading of its NATO allies as tactical wins, the lack of a coherent Western policy on the war has led Kyiv increasingly to take matters into its own hands, as multiple high-profile assassinations of senior Russian military figures in recent months have demonstrated. Aside from fearing for his own life or a future behind bars, though, Putin also appears reluctant to confront the harsh truth that BRICS itself has become a failed geopolitical experiment despite its recent expansion, which saw the group's five original members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — joined by Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (L) at the opening ceremony of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, alongside representatives of the organisation's nine other member states, 6 July 2025. Photo: EPA / ANDRE COELHO The expansion of the group has meant that its already significant intra-member disputes have become even more pronounced. Chief among them is the deeply strained Sino-Indian relationship, with the two countries' long-running border dispute in the Himalayas showing no sign of resolution, not to mention tensions over the safe haven India has granted to the separatist Central Tibetan Administration, or China's cosy ties with Pakistan, whose claim to Kashmir has long been a thorn in New Delhi's side. In the past, Putin has used BRICS summits as a platform to play the peacemaker between the two Asian giants in an attempt to breathe new life into the so-called Primakov Doctrine — a nexus of global influence theorised by former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov in the 1990s that was to be made up of Russia, India and China as a counterweight to US power in the post-Cold War era. This time around, Putin may have accepted that bridging the ideological divide between Beijing and New Delhi was a lost cause given the Modi government's silent endorsement of the Dalai Lama's succession plans, coupled with Pakistan deploying Chinese-made Chengdu J-10 fighter jets in its most recent standoff with India. India is also second-guessing the rationale behind throwing the Russians a lifeline in their hour of need, and by doing so, subjecting itself to diplomatic isolation. China's 'no limits' alliance with the Kremlin notwithstanding, when push comes to shove, the Chinese Communist Party has shown its readiness to abandon its increasingly toxic partner. The fact that up to 98% of Chinese banks now decline all transactions with Russia and have been actively offloading Russian assets since coming under pressure to do so from the US Treasury Department last summer is a case in point. 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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the final day of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 7 July 2025. Photo: EPA / ANTONIO LACERDA The Kremlin's inaction when its ally was attacked demonstrated that the comprehensive strategic partnership signed with such fanfare by both countries earlier this year is hardly worth the paper it was written on. Meanwhile, the blatant victimisation of Central Asian guest workers by the Russian authorities since last year's terror attack on Moscow's Crocus City Hall has not gone unnoticed by countries in the Islamic world. Though Putin had his reasons for not wanting to rub shoulders with some of his fellow BRICS leaders in Rio last weekend, preferring instead to address them remotely, he nevertheless grossly underestimated the optics of not being present at the annual meeting of what is essentially his own vanity project. Already suffering a legitimacy crisis and struggling to make any real headway on its stated aim of replacing the dollar as the default global trading currency, the BRICS grouping would appear to be facing a bleak future if the absence of its two most powerful leaders is anything to go by. Saahil Menon is a Dubai-based freelance journalist. Views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of Novaya Gazeta Europe.
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Russian court sentences writer Boris Akunin in absentia to 14 years in prison — Novaya Gazeta Europe
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Kyiv death toll rises to 28 as rescue operations continue after Russian strikes — Novaya Gazeta Europe
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