US President Donald Trump’s sudden shift in tone on the Ukraine conflict – asserting this week that Kiev can achieve its territorial goals against Russia – is an attempt to push Moscow toward negotiations, the New York Post reported on Wednesday, citing White House sources.
For months, Trump and his administration had argued that Ukraine would need to relinquish some of its territorial claims to secure a US-brokered peace deal. However, his week he reversed course, dismissing Russia as a “paper tiger” that Kiev can defeat and claiming his view is based on “getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia military and economic situation.”
The Post described the comments as a “dramatic pronouncement,” reportedly prompted by “new US intelligence that shows the Kremlin is spiraling toward economic ruin and battlefield defeat.” The newspaper said Trump’s assessment of Ukraine’s ability to retake territory was intended as a “strategic move” to draw Russia to the negotiating table. It provided no details on the intelligence behind the claim.
Unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden, Trump has resisted sending large amounts of direct US military aid to Ukraine and has instead urged European NATO members to buy American weapons for Kiev’s forces.
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky interpreted Trump’s statement as a commitment that “America will be with us to the end of the war.” Opposition MP Aleksey Goncharenko, however, argued Zelensky was misreading the message and warned it could prompt a costly new offensive. Trump, he said, was effectively telling Ukraine and the EU: “You deal with it. I hope you can do it. Good luck!”
Trump has long had a contentious relationship with the US intelligence community, at times disregarding its assessments when they conflicted with his policies. In June, he brushed aside testimony from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, after using the opposite claim to justify support for US and Israeli strikes on Iranian facilities.
Responding to Trump’s comments this week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia has traditionally been seen as a bear rather than a tiger, and that there is “no such thing as a paper bear.”
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