The Daily Populous Saturday August 2nd, 2025 morning edition
Authored by msnbc.com and submitted by msnbc

In between inspecting his golf courses in Scotland and meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President Trump delivered another stern message to Russian President Vladimir Putin this week: the 50-day time frame the United States has given you to stop the war in Ukraine is now reduced to 10 to 12 days. “No reason in waiting,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “We just don’t see any progress being made.”

Those remarks come after weeks in which the Trump administration, and the president specifically, issued pointed barbs at the Russians for impeding the peace process between the two countries, which the White House has tried to facilitate. In addition to sanctions, the administration threatened to slap secondary tariffs on Russia’s trading partners, particularly those who buy Russian oil and gas, if no peace agreement is reached. There was widespread skepticism that Trump would actually go through with this, but Trump’s announcement Wednesday that India will be hit with an additional penalty for purchasing Russian oil suggests this concern was misplaced.

Trump has essentially endorsed the same strategy Biden administration outlined years prior.

Yet even as Trump seems to be getting increasingly tough on Putin for stonewalling peace talks, two questions are front of mind. First, will secondary tariffs affect Moscow’s ability to continue the war? And second, by sanctioning India, does Trump risk undermining a critical strategic relationship that every U.S. president since the turn of the century has sought to cultivate?

The first query is the easier one to answer, if only because the United States and its European allies have spent more than three years trying to change Putin’s calculus on the war with nothing to show for it. Since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, Washington has sent nearly $67 billion in military aid to Kyiv. In addition, the United States and its European allies crafted an unprecedented mechanism that sought to curtail the profits the Russians earned through the sale of oil and gas.

Combined with an export control regime that has locked Russia out of the Western technology sector, and an astounding Russian casualty rate, the West’s aim was to elicit such structural pain on the Russian economy that Kremlin decision-makers would have no choice but to end the conflict. Despite two short aid pauses, Trump has essentially endorsed the same strategy Biden administration outlined years prior.

Putin is certainly feeling the pressure. Although the Russian army is still recruiting approximately 30,000 troops every month, they’re also losing lots of men every single week (the same can be said about the Ukrainians, of course) due to the highly costly, resource-intensive meat-grinding tactics Moscow has employed since the fighting started. Total casualties are around 1 million, including 250,000 deaths. Russia’s economy, which actually grew in 2023 and 2024, is now flirting with a recession as a result of high interest rates and a squeezed labor market, as more fighting-aged Russians are recruited and potentially drafted into the ranks.

While Putin has so far been able to avoid full mobilizations by offering recruits high salaries and signing bonuses, one wonders how long this strategy can hold up given the rate of attrition. Remember, the one time the Kremlin invoked such a measure, in September 2022, the decision was highly unpopular in the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and compelled hundreds of thousands of Russian men to flee the country.

Trump, like much of Washington, doesn’t exactly appreciate what New Delhi is doing.

The Russian strongman is not oblivious to the risks and costs, then, and yet he remains as committed to his maximalist goals in Ukraine today as he was when he first embarked on his war of choice almost three and a half years ago. In case anyone was disabused of this reality, Putin reiterated those objectives less than two months ago, when Russian and Ukrainian officials were meeting for peace talks in Turkey. His demands were the same: Ukraine must withdraw from all four regions of the country Moscow annexed; no head-of-state meeting is possible until a peace deal on Russia’s terms is largely worked out; and Kyiv’s military capacity must be capped.

These aren’t the actions of a man who feels like time isn’t on his side — and Trump’s latest tariff measures are unlikely to change those perceptions.

The second question — is Trump jeopardizing the U.S.-India relationship — is the more important one for American policymakers. Maintaining an adequate, stable balance of power in East Asia, a region the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. national security bureaucracy view as the most important theater in the world today, is presumably a higher strategic priority for the United States than ending the war in Ukraine. Keeping India, South Asia’s powerhouse, on its side is a key part of this strategy.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment across political lines has long been frustrated with India for taking advantage of the war in Ukraine, as well as Western sanctions, for its own self-interest. Moscow, unable to sell its oil and natural gas to the West, needs an alternative market, and New Delhi has been more than happy to buy for the right price.

In 2021, India imported less than 12% of its oil from Russia; last month, that figure rose to 35%. Overall, India has bought nearly 130 billion euros (or about $148 billion, based on today’s exchange rate) worth of Russian crude since the war in Ukraine began, a hefty chunk of change for Moscow to finance the war effort. The partnership has served both sides well; the Russians receive desperately needed revenue, and the Indians receive discounted energy.

Trump, like much of Washington, doesn’t exactly appreciate what New Delhi is doing and is using the stick to ward Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi into finding alternative sources of energy. Yet Trump’s desire to forge a successful policy against Russia also increases the risk of undermining his China policy, as India, an important counter-balancer to Beijing’s influence in the region, is forced into reassessing its own relations with the United States. Modi has even less of an incentive to do Trump any favors on China if he’s also getting hit over the head with the tariff stick. The White House is, in essence, in danger of cutting off its nose to spite its face.

U.S. grand strategy is already a mess, and Trump, yet again, is making it messier.