Trump throws gauntlet down on Putin — who gambled he could stall his way to victory

The time for talk is over. President Donald Trump issued a major deadline to Russia on Monday. If Moscow does not “make a deal” with Kyiv within 50 days, countries that do business with Russia will face a whopping 100 percent tariff when their companies trade with the United States.

To end the war in Ukraine, “I felt that we had a deal about four times, and here we are, still talking about it,” Trump said from the Oval Office alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “Every night people are dying.”

Trump’s hard deadline for Russia also includes a major agreement to supply Ukraine with new weapons from European stockpiles.

Under NATO’s auspices, allies like Germany will transfer sizable portions of their arsenal to Ukraine. In exchange, European governments will pay the United States to resupply their militaries with replacement hardware.

According to Trump, the plan covers “everything. It’s everything, it’s a full complement.” Rutte stressed, “This is really big. It will mean that Ukraine can get its hands on air defense, and also missiles, and ammunition.”

This would reportedly include “long-range missiles that could strike deep inside Russia.”

The deal represents a major victory for Rutte, who has emerged as a leading mediator between Washington and European capitals. Meanwhile, Kyiv will acquire a new infusion of additional stockpiles from Europe. It is a need that the Ukrainian government has been highlighting for months; and it would be a sustainable benefit to the US industrial base.

Importantly, the announcement signals that Putin’s negotiating strategy of buying time has reached the end of the road with Trump. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump informed his Cabinet last week. “He’s very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

From the outset of Trump’s second term, Putin has gambled that the Russian military, bolstered by ammunition and soldiers from North Korea, drone technology from Iran, and restricted Western electronics from resellers in China and elsewhere, could outlast Ukraine on the battlefield.

By some estimates, Kyiv was on pace to exhaust the last (and perhaps final) package of Congressionally-authorized spending on arms for Ukraine by the late summer or early fall of 2025.

Once those stocks were depleted, Putin may have assumed that Europe could not cover the shortfall. All he needed to do was play for time with Trump until Ukraine exhausted its ammunition.

Monday’s White House ultimatum should alter Putin’s calculus for the endgame of the war. It also signifies a major breakthrough for President Volodymyr Zelensky.

After his disastrous first meeting in the Oval Office in February, where Trump asserted to Zelensky, “You have no cards,” the Ukrainian president has learned how to talk with and deftly respond to the American president.

Ukraine has since done everything that America asked. Zelensky agreed to an immediate ceasefire with Russia, even as Putin attacked Ukrainian civilians. He signed onto Trump’s critical materials deal.

The goodwill that Zelensky has steadily established with Trump by working closely with the White House is now paying dividends.

When the US Defense Department abruptly halted authorized shipments of arms to Ukraine in July, Zelensky did not overreact. Instead, he got Trump on the phone. “I’d say it was probably the best conversation we’ve had so far, extremely fruitful,” he said.

Zelensky was right. Trump promptly overruled the Defense Department, resumed the deliveries, and has now cut a long-term deal with NATO to maintain Ukraine’s Western pipeline of weapons via NATO’s European allies and American industry. The weapons deal with NATO means that Ukraine will be able to defend its cities and critical infrastructure while attacking military targets far behind the frontlines.

The pressure is now on Putin.

As Trump previously demonstrated with his 60-day negotiating deadline with the clerical regime in Iran: a deadline is a deadline.

While the details of the president’s “secondary tariffs” are not fully public, at a minimum Russia will have a difficult time selling oil and gas to buyers around the world if they face a 100 percent tariff when trading with the United States. If Trump sticks to his guns and does not waffle, equally applied secondary tariffs on Russia’s global trading partners would constrict the hard currency that the Kremlin needs to keep its economy afloat.

Trump has now thrown the gauntlet. He must now be on guard for further attempts by Putin to “tap him along” and play for time while killing Ukrainians.

Peter Doran is an adjunct senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.