Why Trump Is Pissed Off at Putin – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Russia is positioning forces for a major spring offensive all along Ukraine’s front line, which may last well into the summer, according to many analysts. Putin wants to fully control at least three of Ukraine’s four eastern regions prior to any general ceasefire proposed by President Donald Trump and his reluctant but increasingly desperate Ukrainian partner, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Putin aims to turn territorial concessions into a mere formality by the time he sits at the negotiating table in about six months’ time and move the discussions to lifting Western economic sanctions, ensuring the future neutrality of Ukraine, and engineering a postwar political order in Kyiv.

This is what can be discerned from Putin’s most recent military moves as he slow-walks peace talks. Trump said he is “pissed off with Putin” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a NATO summit in Brussels last week that the administration is “not going to fall in the trap of negotiations about negotiations.” It’s not swallowing the old Soviet stalling tactic displayed famously by communist North Vietnam at the 1960s Paris peace talks, where it argued endlessly about the shape of the negotiating table while moving forces down the Ho Chi Minh trail into the South.

President Trump has openly threatened to further tighten sanctions on Russia unless talks move forward and Russia accepts a total ceasefire. He has mentioned imposing “secondary sanctions” on countries that continue buying oil from Russia. “That would get Putin’s attention,” says former NATO chief, Admiral James Stavridis. But the administration may be opting for stepping up military support to Kyiv at a time when further trade restrictions might dangerously exacerbate international trade tensions created by its sweeping tariff war.

Covert U.S. Support for Ukraine?

According to the authoritative online media source specialized in the international defense industry, Bulgarianmilitary.com, eight heavy lift U.S. air cargo jets have landed at the military section of Poland’s Rzeszów airport over recent days. This apparently massive airlift to the main transshipment point for arms into Ukraine could be the largest U.S. delivery since the former Biden administration dropped its final loads last January.

Heavy lift Boeing 747s taxiing down Rzeszów’s runway since March 27 are flying from military bases in the U.S. and Germany used for large scale rapid deployments of troops and materiel: McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, Biggs Army Airfield in Texas, the Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina, and Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The 140-ton cargo capacity of a Boeing 747 matches that of regular Air Force C-17 Globemasters, and their flights are generally operated by civilian defense contractors such as Atlas Air and Kalitta Air under the Civil Reserve Air Fleet.

The covert aspect of the recent air lifts may indicate that the Trump administration is taking a low-key approach to urgently rearm Ukraine following its army’s recent massive losses in Kursk. More than 700 pieces of heavy armor, combat vehicles, and artillery were destroyed by Russia, according to official, and probably conservative, estimates of what appears to have been a rout. NATO saber rattling that became counterproductive and often dangerous under the former Biden administration may be replaced by hidden escalation under Trump. (RELATED:Running Out of Cards in Kursk)

The Bulgarianmilitary.com report citing data from the Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) research group offers no specifics on the weapons being presumably shipped, but the 747 cargo fuselage can fit armored vehicles, HIMARS rocket systems, air defense missiles, field howitzers, long range drones, and massive quantities of ammunition.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Christopher Cavoli hinted at direct U.S. deliveries of F-16s to supplement small batches of the U.S. jet fighters supplied to Ukraine by Denmark and the Netherlands. Other European countries promising to donate F-16s from their air fighter wings as part of an agreement with the U.S. have failed to deliver. Aside from the urgent task of protecting Ukrainian airspace against Russian drones and missiles, F-16s will also conduct ground attack missions against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, according to Cavoli, who assured committee chairman Senator Tom Wicker that the pilots will all be Ukrainian.

Cavoli appeared to dismiss prospects of a Russian big push, saying that Ukrainian counterattacks have halted Russia’s advance on Pokrovsk at the southern end of the critical Donetsk section of the front and that ridge line fortifications in Chasiv Yar, whose capture would place the main industrial center of Kramatorsk within range of Russian guns, have held up.

“Chasiv Yar is holding after eight months of Russia trying to take it,” Cavoli said. But Russian military podcasters report that Kremlin forces are closing their encirclement of the fortress town with growing deployment of Spetsnaz units capable of operating in the difficult, rugged terrain crisscrossed by canals that serve as natural barriers and moats for Ukrainian defenders.

Putin’s “Army of Kursk” Still a Threat

Russia has also managed to clear the key town of Toretsk, pushing back Ukrainian counterattacks which briefly retook part of it. The transfer of a full army division from Pokrovsk to secure Toretsk, as reported by The American Spectator last month, indicates the priorities of Russian military planners devising a move on Kramatorsk from the south to split Ukraine’s logistical lines, passing through the neighboring city of Kostyantynivka lying only some 15 miles up a dual two-lane carriageway from Toretsk. (RELATED: Zelensky Has Left Ukraine With a Poor Hand)

Putin’s forces are also launching concerted attacks in the southeastern region of Zaporizhzhia where they have recaptured the salient Robotyne held by Ukraine since the 2023 “counteroffensive,” while widening Russia’s perimeter around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor plant, the largest in Europe. According to Russian military bloggers, they’ve outflanked Ukrainian fortifications blocking approaches to the regional capital, taking some key villages and entrenched positions from the rear.

Russian forces are advancing north of Donetsk in the province of Luhansk, from where they are preparing to attack the Ukrainian stronghold in Lyman, which protects northern approaches to the city of Sloviansk, the northern leg of the industrial urban triangle centered on Kramatorsk. Russian forces have also managed to cross to the west bank of the Oskil River to threaten Ukraine’s eastern capital of Kharkiv, liberated by Ukrainian forces in a lightning campaign in late 2022.

There are questions as to the future deployment of the large army group that Putin assembled to push Ukraine from Kursk. A collateral effect of Zelensky’s doomed incursion was the formation of a major Russian force in an, until then, neglected area of the front, composed of marines brought up from coastal garrisons as far away as the Pacific port of Vladivostok: Chechen Akhmet militias which had been withdrawn from Ukraine over their proclivity for war crimes too hideous even for Putin; 13,000 North Koreans exchanged by Kim Jung Un for Russian missile technology to better torment his neighbors; and recently trained drone units successfully testing newly developed fiber optic cable-guided FPVs that devastated Ukrainian supply convoys and armored columns moving between the Russian border and the Ukrainian occupied town of Sudzha.

Official claims by Kyiv about “decimating” Russia’s Kursk force with 70,000 casualties seem ridiculously exaggerated, raising doubts about the high estimates of Russian losses consistently circulated by Ukrainian officials. Propaganda is part of war, but when it filters into supposedly objective assessments of leading U.S. defense officials like General Cavoli, whose recent congressional statement reflected Zelensky’s portrayal of the Kursk campaign as successful, a “credibility gap” may develop, like that which undermined American public support for the war in Vietnam. The CIA strongly warned Zelensky against invading Kursk, according to an extensive investigative report by the New York Times.

Putin’s “Army of Kursk,” however bruised, now seems to be moving across the border to take Ukraine’s province of Sumy. While some Western analysts believe that parts of the makeshift force are being sent to Donetsk, Russia’s defense ministry says that they have taken two Ukrainian border villages and are preparing to assault the city of Sumy, which had remained unmolested by Russia until Zelensky turned it into the base for his march on Kursk.

Sumy is now on Putin’s wish list, and fears of further territorial loss have driven Ukraine’s high command to send good money after bad with another brigade-sized assault on the Russian border region of Belgorod, just south of Kursk, in hopes of drawing Russian forces away from Sumy.

Repeating the same action over and over again, expecting a different result, is a sign of insanity, psychologists say. Western hopes of stopping Putin may hinge on the possibility that his pathological greed may lead to a repetition of mistakes that almost collapsed his regime when he initially launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. His army became overstretched in the complex, multifront offensive moving on various axes. It got routed outside Kyiv and failed to reach its other main objective, the strategic Black Sea port of Odessa. The Russian Navy’s inability to maintain a naval blockade has undoubtedly weighed heavily on Putin’s tacit acceptance of a ceasefire on the Black Sea.

Putin may again be biting off more than he can chew in his upcoming offensive, and if Russian forces get sufficiently hammered at a vulnerable point, he may well be tempted to go for the negotiated compromise that Trump wants to arrange. He is a seasoned KGB survivor, but it will take more time and further military commitment on the part of the U.S. to leverage the outcome. A highly realistic approach is needed, and Pentagon chieftains parroting Ukrainian tall tales won’t help.

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