U.S. President Donald Trump has appeared to once again begin moving back to threatening Russia only 6 days after his summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
On Thursday, Trump posted to Truth Social stating “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia. Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND. How did that work out? Regardless, this is a war that would have NEVER happened if I were President - ZERO CHANCE. Interesting times ahead!!!”.
The post comes amid reports that Trump has given up for the moment on hosting a trilateral meeting between himself and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
When Trump met with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska last Friday, Trump made a big concession in which he agreed to come off his position of pushing an immediate ceasefire and push for a long term peace settlement, however, when he met with Zelensky and a host of EU leaders at the White House on Monday, it appears Putin, following a phone call with Trump, turned down the idea of meeting Zelensky.
Since starting a peace process back in February in which Trump has tried to portray the U.S. as an uninvolved, third party mediator, Trump has gone back and forth from giving rosy assessments of the peace process to expressing anger at Putin and seeming to threaten Russia on a regular basis.
Also on Thursday, in an interview Trump stated that he would see in “2 weeks” he would know if a peace deal is possible, before threatening to go “a different track” if it wasn’t. Since this past spring, Trump has on numerous occasions given artificial 2 week deadlines for an achievement in Ukraine and has yet to either act on his threats, nor walk away from the negotiations as he has also repeatedly threatened.
One of the possible reasons for Trump’s tirade on Thursday were the Russian strikes on Wednesday night in the Ukrainian city of Mukachevo, located in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region, near the border with Hungary.
A Russian strike destroyed the American-owned Flex factory, owned by , a Texas-based multinational electronics manufacturer.
While the Ukrainian government claimed this was a civilian factory which designed coffee makers, printer cartridges, and digital price tags, the Russians claim it was used to develop components for drones.
The Flex factory was noted to be working in 3 shifts, with workers present in the overnight strike that was reported to have injured 15 workers, giving an indication of the importance of the facility to be in operation 24 hours.