CNN
—
It’s been a long two weeks.
Since at least the end of April, President Donald Trump has been telling reporters he will decide what to do in Ukraine in two weeks, using the timeframe over and over to suggest he is close to a final assessment on how to proceed.
It is not a new tactic. Trump has been setting two-week deadlines since at least the start of his first term in 2017 — for policy plans, long-awaited decisions or unspecified major announcements. Many never arrived.
Now, as Trump faces a decision on whether to apply new sanctions on Moscow or to walk away altogether from efforts to broker peace, he again says it will take a fortnight to determine whether his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin is serious about ending the war in Ukraine.
“We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not. And if he is, we’ll respond a little bit differently,” Trump said Wednesday when questioned in the Oval Office about Putin’s intentions. “But it’ll take about a week and a half, two weeks.”
Trump did not say what, exactly, he was waiting to learn in the next two weeks that would cause him to finalize his assessment of the Russian leader. Nor did he say exactly what he was prepared to do when the deadline was up.
How to end the seemingly intractable war in Ukraine has become one of the major conundrum’s of Trump’s presidency. To his deep frustration, the conflict has proved more difficult to resolve than he expected.
As far back as April 24, Trump suggested a reporter follow up – in two weeks – with their question about continued military assistance in Ukraine.
“Let’s see what happens,” he said. “You can ask that question in two weeks, and we’ll see.”
Three days later, it was as if no time had passed.
“We’ll let you know in about two weeks,” he told a reporter that day who asked whether he trusted the Russian president.
As it turned out, Wednesday was exactly two weeks from another of Trump’s assertions, on May 14, that he would soon provide an update on whether Putin was “tapping him along.”
“I’ll let you know in a week,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I’ll let you know in a few days.”
About a week after that, on May 19, he said it would take another two weeks to determine whether Ukraine was doing enough to end the conflict.
“I’d rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can’t say yes or no,” he said.
Trump and his team have been exasperated over the last week waiting for Moscow to produce a memorandum laying out its position on potential peace talks. The Kremlin said Wednesday the document was finished, and that it would present it to Ukraine during a round of talks in Istanbul next week.
But there was little to indicate any new breakthroughs were imminent in ending the conflict.
The plodding pace of talks has led Trump to worry Putin could be dragging things out. Yet the US president has, so far, stopped short of imposing sanctions or taking other action. He acknowledged this week there was more he could do.
“What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He’s playing with fire!”
Even as Trump continues to mull new sanctions on Moscow, potentially targeting the banking or energy sectors, he voiced concern new measures could push Putin away from talks.
“If I think I’m close to getting a deal, I don’t want to screw it up by doing that,” he said Wednesday, suggesting he remains undecided on whether to move ahead with the various options his team has drawn up.
He has also weighed walking away altogether from his attempts to mediate the war if it appears the two sides’ differences cannot be bridged. His top lieutenants have said at various points over the last month that time is growing short for any American role in ending the war.
“I think this is going to be a very critical week. This week is going to be really important week in which we have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told an NBC interviewer on April 27.
If a determination was made the following week, it wasn’t made public.
Instead, Trump has tried to keep his options open while still attempting to distance himself from the war. After speaking with Putin by telephone last week, he said it would be up to Ukraine and Russia to resolve their differences.
He told European leaders the same day he would not join them in applying new sanctions – at least for now. And he said in his view, Putin believed he was winning the war.
Yet by the following Sunday, he’d grown frustrated again with the Russian leader, who had launched the biggest aerial assault of the 3-year war on multiple Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv.
“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump bemoaned, claiming his counterpart had changed over time.
In fact, a changed Putin is precisely what many European leaders have been warning Trump of for months, even before he returned to office. In December, as Trump visited Paris for the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral, French President Emmanuel Macron tried telling him the Russian leader he got to know during his first term in office was not the same man.
He hadn’t appeared to internalize the warnings until this week, when he deemed Putin had gone “absolutely CRAZY.” On Wednesday, he insisted his forceful new tone was itself a strong rebuke of Moscow, even absent new sanctions.
“The words speak pretty loud,” he insisted. “We’re not happy about that situation.”
But when asked whether he still believed Putin wanted the war to end, he said he would need more time.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said, “but I’ll let you know in about two weeks.”
