There was surprisingly little in Donald Trump’s inaugural address about Russia and Ukraine, aside from a vague pledge to ‘stop all wars’. There was certainly no repeat of his campaign trail promise to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office.
But, while answering reporters’ questions in the Oval Office as he signed a flurry of executive orders, Trump did comment on Zelensky and Putin – the two men he wants to bring to the negotiating table. ‘Zelensky wants to make a deal’ said Trump. He ‘didn’t know’ if Putin does too, but ‘he should’. And then the returning president said something far more revealing: he claimed Putin was ‘destroying Russia’ by not agreeing to a peace deal and that the country’s economy is in ‘big trouble’. It’s this last comment that should ring the loudest alarm bells in the Kremlin. Has Trump seized on the fact that Russia’s increasingly fragile economy is the soft underbelly of Putin’s war effort?
Since 2022, the Russian economy has effectively been on a war-time footing.
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