Vladimir Putin’s finally starting to sweat — so it’s time for Trump to turn up the heat

With Vladimir Putin’s war machine sputtering, it’s time to push the Kremlin even harder to force an end to his war on Ukraine.

President Donald Trump’s moves such as seizing “shadow fleet” tankers and piling on new tariffs on importers of Moscow’s oil are plainly hitting hard: You can tell because Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is whining that Washington won’t make Kyiv agree to de facto surrender (e.g., Russia control over Ukraine’s post-war government) as he claims President Donald Trump had agreed to do.

Why does Russia need America’s intervention, if it’s winning on the battlefield?

With Vladimir Putin’s war machine sputtering, it’s time to push the Kremlin even harder to force an end to his war on Ukraine, the Post Editorial Board writes. POOL/AFP via Getty Images

“The United States has effectively declared a goal of economic domination,” Lavrov cries — a clear sign that Putin’s feeling squeezed.

Thanks to sanctions (India’s reduced its oil purchases), Russia is running low on foreign exchange; the Kremlin’s so desperate that it’s disguising oil shipments to Cuba as “humanitarian aid” — a move that defies Trump’s warning about propping up the Castro regime and so begs for more US tariffs.

Of course, Trump is only seeking to broker a peace deal that ends four bloody years of death and destruction without handing Putin the victory he can’t win on his own.

Meanwhile, Moscow is citing fictitious Ukrainian counter-offensives to explain why it doesn’t control territories its forces were claiming they’d seized in Zaporizhia oblast; it looks like Putin’s frontline commanders are afraid to tell the high command they’re failing.

Poor Vlad: Having caught on to how Putin’s thugs were using hijacked Starlink terminals to guide their drones in massive long-distance attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid and civilian population, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is now blocking of Russian access to Starlink, disabling Moscow’s frontline command-and-control communications for another game-changer.

Russia’s damning whine: Blocking it from Starlink is (somehow) a violation of international law.

Putin is still throwing bodies into the war, hoping to somehow blow a big enough hole in the line to allow a full breakthrough, still seeking to slaughter civilians to destroy Ukraine’s will to fight on — but it’s not working as the Western alliance holds together in supplying and supporting Kyiv’s forces and turning the economic screws ever-tighter.  

The braying of the Kremlin’s despicable “diplomats” suggests Vlad is sweating.

Trump’s set a new deadline of June for a peace deal; if he wants Putin to deliver by then, he should keep turning up the heat.