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“We’re going to put sanctions,” the president said, even before a deadline he had given Russia this week to engage in cease-fire negotiations had passed.
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and writes often on national security issues.
July 31, 2025
President Trump on Thursday sharpened his threat to impose sanctions on Russia over its war in Ukraine, even while acknowledging that the weapon he once argued worked on everyone — the threat of financial ruin — may have no effect on its president, Vladimir V. Putin.
“We’re going to put sanctions,” he said, even though a deadline he gave Moscow this week to seriously engage on a cease-fire had not yet passed. “Russia? I think it’s disgusting what they’re doing,” he said, apparently referring to its continued bombing of Ukraine.
Mr. Trump’s comments came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged in an interview with Fox News Radio that the administration held secret talks with Russia this week — “not with Putin but with some of Putin’s top people” — and made no progress on a cease-fire. Mr. Trump said he was dispatching his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Russia again, but the last visit that Mr. Witkoff, a fellow real estate investor, paid to Mr. Putin proved fruitless.
Administration officials gave no reasons to believe the latest engagement with Russia would be any more useful. And Mr. Trump himself, usually a true believer in the power of economic sanctions to alter the decisions of foreign leaders, admitted for the second time this week that Mr. Putin appears to be immune.
“I don’t know that sanctions bother him,” he said on Thursday.
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has now executed a 180-degree turn on Russia, at least in tone, in roughly 180 days.
He came to office questioning whether Russia was truly the invader of Ukraine, and hinting that the Ukrainians were responsible for their own troubles. His famous blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February led him to briefly cut off aid to the Ukrainian military. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that Ukraine would never join NATO — a reversal of stated American policy — and Vice President JD Vance spoke out against arming the Ukrainians. Russia was exempted from most tariffs.
That has been followed by a series of apparent reversals, with no public acknowledgment from Mr. Trump that he is changing strategy. He no longer relies on what he has framed as a deep past relationship with Mr. Putin in an effort to win him over. In fact, he has been quite open about his frustration that conversations about cease-fires are usually followed by Russian escalation, often in the pace of drone and missile attacks.
“I think what bothers the president the most is he has these great phone calls where everyone sort of claims yeah, we’d like to see this end, if we could find a way forward,” Mr. Rubio said in his Fox interview, “and then he turns on the news and another city has been bombed, including those far from the front lines.”
“So at some point,” Mr. Rubio told his interviewer, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio, “he’s got to make a decision here about what — how much to continue to engage in an effort to do cease-fires if one of the two sides is not interested.”
On Monday, Mr. Trump said he would give Russia about 10 to 12 days to end the war before imposing “sanctions and maybe tariffs, secondary tariffs,” a reference to sanctions on countries that trade with Russia.
But there is reason to question how far Mr. Trump will push for full secondary sanctions, which would involve threatening the three countries buying much of Russia’s oil and gas: China, India and Turkey. All are key to other American interests, and Mr. Trump is likely to need future favors and cooperation from them. And it is hard to imagine that China’s president, Xi Jinping, would abandon Mr. Putin, his most critical partner in challenging American power.
Mr. Rubio took up the hard choices in his conversation with Mr. Kilmeade, arguing that “the president has a lot of options.” He noted that if the United States could get at Russia’s oil sales, it “is a huge part of their revenue.”
For their part, Russian officials who have long been presumed to speak with Mr. Putin’s blessing have dismissed Mr. Trump’s threats, portraying him in Russian media as erratic and unpredictable.
“Fifty days, it used to be 24 hours, it used to be 100 days,” Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said a few weeks ago, as Mr. Trump kept moving the deadlines. “We’ve been through all this.”
Democrats say Mr. Trump has other options: He could provide direct military aid to Ukraine, as Congress did during the Biden administration. Instead, he has an elaborate plan to sell arms and related technologies to Europe, which will then donate them to Ukraine.
Mr. Trump once suggested he could end the war in 24 hours simply by negotiating with Mr. Putin, man to man. But now, as Mr. Trump’s frustration over the conflict grows, his threats have raised questions about how much leverage the United States has with Moscow — and whether Mr. Trump is willing to use it.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
