Oh, look, tough talk from President Donald Trump. Looks like POTUS just cut short his deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to reach a peace agreement with Ukraine. During a recent appearance in Scotland alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump announced that Moscow now has less than two weeks to broker a deal or face serious financial consequences.
“I’m going to make a new deadline of about …10 or 12 days from today,” Trump stated, expressing dissatisfaction with the pace of progress. “I’m disappointed in President Putin. Russia and Ukraine, I would have said five times we had a deal.”
Trump originally gave Putin 50 days to negotiate a ceasefire when he introduced the plan on July 14, signaling that buyers of Russian exports would be hit with tariffs “at about 100 percent” if no agreement was in place by early September.
Now, get this: with the initial timeline abruptly shortened, Trump says the pressure is on. “We don’t see any progress being made,” he said, adding that he plans to finalize the revised deadline “tonight or tomorrow.”
“There’s no reason to wait,” he explained. “If you know what the answer is going to be, why wait?”
Trump also opened up about his prior relationship with Putin. “I spoke to President Putin a lot. Got along with him very well,” he said. But that changed as violence escalated in Ukraine. “Then President Putin launches rockets into a city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in a nursing home, or wherever and there are bodies lying all over the streets.”
We’ll see if this threat has substance or if it’s talk.