President Donald Trump escalated his criticism towards Russia on Sunday after weeks of being accused of taking Vladimir Putin’s side in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
The US president called up NBC’s Kristen Welker prior to her Sunday appearance as host of Meet the Press, according to Welker. He told her that he was “p***ed off” after the Russian president called for elections in Ukraine and once again questioned the legitimacy of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government — comments the U.S. president said were unhelpful.
Even though U.S. negotiators are currently engaged in moderating peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia, on Sunday, Donald Trump put the blame squarely on Putin’s shoulders, adding that he was “very angry” at the Russian president. Putin’s recent comments about Zelensky, he said, were “not going in the right location.”
The president further threatened to raise tariffs on Russian energy exports if a deal was not reached due to interference or delays on Moscow’s end. The U.S. has recently levied tariffs on a number of countries including Canada and Mexico as the Trump administration seeks 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,” Trump told NBC News.
“That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States,” he continued. “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 the Putin’s full-scale began in earnest, and with hundreds of thousands now dead in the conflict, including more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians.
State Department officials told reporters this past week that funding had resumed for a program operated by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab aimed at documenting and tracking nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children believed to have been abducted by Russian forces during the invasion. The program had initially lost funding due to Elon Musk-led DOGE spending cuts, but was restarted after a bipartisan outcry.
Plans for a broader peace agreement ending the three-year long period of open warfare are still far on the horizon, and U.S. officials have cautioned that both Ukraine and Russia will need to make concessions for a deal to be inked. It still remains unclear if the Trump administration plans to force Ukrainian recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, though it seems likely that Ukraine will be forced to drop its bid to join NATO — a goal which had been supported by the last U.S. president.
Trump touted his relationship with Putin and his dealmaking abilities as reasons why he could end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in “24 hours” were he to be elected president throughout the 2024 campaign. The reality of the slow pace of peace talks seems to have frustrated the Republican president, whose ire was previously apparent when he and Vice President JD Vance angrily berated Zelensky in the White House in an ambush-style showdown in front of news cameras. He would also refer to Zelensky as a “dictator” on Truth Social.
That blowup of US-Ukraine relations led to the termination of talks around Kyiv granting access to rare earth mineral deposits to American buyers, which the Trump administration has portrayed as its own kind of security guarantee for Ukraine’s future on the assumption that Russian officials would think twice about threatening US economic assets.
It was reported this past week that a new push by Trump aims at securing a deal to repay Ukrainian war debt through royalties on Ukrainian energy sales, including oil and gas.