Trump Accuses His Benefactor Putin Of Spewing ‘Bullshit’ About Ukraine Invasion

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused the Russian dictator he has long admired and who helped him win the presidency in 2016 of offering up “bullshit” in ceasefire talks to end his bloody assault on neighboring Ukraine.

“We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters of Vladimir Putin. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

Trump during the Cabinet meeting photo opportunity also said he had approved the transfer of weapons to Ukraine to defend itself from Putin’s nightly attacks against Ukrainian civilians. The number of missiles and drones Russia has been firing of late has been several times higher than it was before Trump retook office in January.

“He’s not treating human beings right. He’s killing too many people,” Trump said.

Trump’s new criticisms of his benefactor are a departure from the way he has spoken of Putin for years.

When Putin started the war in February 2022, Trump in the first days called it “savvy” and “genius.” In the months and years to come, he continued defending Putin and essentially blaming Ukraine for getting invaded, as he did during an Oval Office visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February.

A rescue worker on Friday assesses the site of an airstrike on a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine. Russia unleashed the airstrikes as U.S. President Donald Trump expressed disappointment over the outcome of his latest phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed at bringing an end to the war.

Andrew Kravchenko/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Trump as he campaigned to return to the White House last year claimed he would be able to end the war in a single day, and in fact would do so before he even took office Jan. 20. Since then, though, he has acknowledged that making Putin stop his killing was proving more difficult than he anticipated. Recently, he expressed bewilderment about the former KGB officer who openly pines for the days of the old Soviet Union.

“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump told reporters in May. “I’ve known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.”

Trump, however, continues repeating lies about Russia’s invasion, including some that made many of his followers turn against Ukraine over the last two years. Trump, for example, again falsely claimed on Tuesday that the United States had sent three times as much assistance to Ukraine as European nations have.

In fact, Europe has provided more, and that was true even before the U.S., under Trump, slowed down weapons shipments to Ukraine.

When Trump was asked about the latest episode of that, he claimed not to know anything about it or who within his administration had ordered it. “I don’t know,” he told the reporter. “Why don’t you tell me?”

The person who knew all about it because he authorized it in Trump’s name was sitting right beside him at the time: Trump’s defense secretary, former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth. A top Hegseth aide last week explained that the pause in weapons to Ukraine was necessary because predecessor Joe Biden had sent too many weapons and had failed to keep track of it all, causing shortages for the U.S.

That assertion, however, was false. Every shipment under Biden was accompanied by an analysis showing its effect on U.S. readiness.

In 2016, Russian spies stole material from presidential Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign and then transferred it to WikiLeaks, a publisher of leaked documents. Trump learned in August of that year from an intelligence briefing given to both candidates that the WikiLeaks material had come from Russia but then used it anyway every single day in the final month of the campaign.