CNN
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Two weeks after President Donald Trump set a 14-day timeline for determining the willingness of his Russian counterpart to end the conflict in Ukraine, he says he is coming to believe Vladimir Putin doesn’t care about the human cost of his war.
“I’m starting to think maybe he doesn’t,” Trump said when an interviewer asked whether Putin minded losing thousands of his soldiers in Ukraine every week.
The candid admission, made in a New York Post podcast recorded this week, underscored the difficulties Trump continues to face in brokering complex international deals, including on issues he once said could be easily resolved.
He also now appears less confident in striking a nuclear deal with Iran, despite saying days ago he believed the talks were progressing in the right direction. And negotiations to end the war in Gaza have been deadlocked, with Trump’s agitation toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deepening.
While Trump did find success this week in working out an agreement with China to roll back some of the punitive measures each side had enacted amid a worsening trade war, it wasn’t clear how long the new framework would hold. A deal made last month in Switzerland with similar terms quickly fell apart.
And so far there has been only one trade agreement to emerge from the 90-day negotiating period Trump set with US partners this spring after pausing his reciprocal tariffs. The deadline comes due in early July.
Even Trump’s overtures to his onetime pen-pal Kim Jong Un have apparently fallen flat. Attempts to deliver a letter from Trump to the North Korean dictator were rebuffed by diplomats based at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, according to the Seoul-based NK News, scuttling immediate hopes of rekindling the first-term friendship Trump enjoyed with the strongman. CNN has reached out to the White House about the letter.
But the administration hasn’t given up on any of the difficult issues that remain unresolved. Despite suggesting he might walk away entirely from the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump hasn’t entirely abandoned his efforts. He is entering an intensive stretch of summitry that is likely to focus on the war, including a Group of 7 meeting in Canada next week and a NATO summit in the Netherlands later this month.
His team, led by special envoy Steve Witkoff, plans another round of Iran talks in the coming days, even amid loudening opposition to a deal from some Iran hawks and Israeli officials.
And trade talks continue apace as the July 9 deadline nears.
“You’re going to see deal after deal that’s going to start coming next week. And the week after and the week after,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC on Wednesday. “We’ve got lots of them in the hopper. We just want to make sure they’re the best deal we can possibly make. We don’t want to rush.”
Still, Trump’s own comments this week offered stark insight into his frustrated — and, for him, frustrating — attempts at negotiating deals around the world.
“We make progress and then all of a sudden, something gets bombed that shouldn’t be bombed, and that’s the end of the progress,” he said of the Ukraine conflict, describing a two-steps-forward, one-step-back reality to the grinding efforts to broker a ceasefire.
It was two weeks ago Wednesday that Trump vowed to have an answer in a fortnight on Putin’s willingness to end the war, a timeline he’s used repeatedly this spring when questioned about his Ukraine policy.
Since then, Trump has not made a decision on applying new sanctions on Moscow, even as his Republican allies on Capitol Hill agitate for harsher measures and Europe imposes new restrictions on Russia’s oil and gas sector.
“I’ll use it if it’s necessary,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One last Friday. He said senators, many of whom have signed on to a bill to increase sanctions on Russia, are leaving the decision up to him. But he said he hadn’t discussed the matter with them.
“I haven’t spoken to them about it,” he said. “They have a bill, it’s going to be up to me, it’s my option.”
At the same time, Trump hasn’t taken steps toward boosting military assistance to Ukraine, which this week has come under some of the biggest drone assaults of the war. It’s something he’s likely to hear about from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the upcoming summits, which Zelensky is expected to attend.
Trump’s defense chief Pete Hegseth told lawmakers Tuesday there would be a “reduction in this budget” of military assistance to Kyiv.
“This administration takes a very different view of that conflict. We believe that a negotiated peaceful settlement is in the best interest of both parties and our nation’s interests, especially with all the competing interests around the globe,” Hegseth said in congressional testimony.
Since he offered the two-week deadline two weeks ago, Trump spoke to Putin once. But in his own telling, the conversation was not enough to prompt an immediate peace.
“We had a good conversation,” Trump said. “But so far, nothing’s come of it.”
So, too, has nothing come yet from his efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“I’m getting more and more less confident about it. They seem to be delaying, and I think that’s a shame, but I’m less confident now than I would have been a couple of months ago,” Trump said in the podcast interview. “Something happened to them, but I am much less confident of a deal being made,” he went on, saying it was his “instincts” telling him a deal was moving further from reach.
At issue is Iran’s insistence it be able to continue enriching uranium, which Trump has said it must give up in order to see some sanctions lifted as part of a deal.
That’s much the same issue that prolonged nuclear talks with Iran under Barack Obama, whose eventual deal allowed low levels of enrichment. Trump withdrew from the pact during his first term, but now finds himself working through many of the same sticking points.
A new round of talks with Iran is set to take place in the coming days, US officials have said. The US has been waiting for an official response from Tehran to its latest proposal.
A two-month deadline to reach a deal that Trump set in a letter to Iran’s leaders in April is set to expire this week. In the podcast interview, Trump said Iran would regret not making a deal, since the alternative was war.
“It would be nicer to do it without warfare, without people dying,” he said. “Yes, so much nicer to do it. But I don’t think I see the same level of enthusiasm for them to make a deal.”
