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Donald Trump doubled down on his pro-Russia strategy on Monday, deflecting blame away from Moscow for deadly ballistic missile attacks in Ukraine, while taking no action to ratchet up pressure on the Kremlin to implement the cease-fire the president repeatedly promised on the 2024 campaign trail.
Trump has made normalizing ties with Moscow the centerpiece of his peace plan intended to bring the three-year war to a halt — even as Russia has significantly increased its campaign of drone and missile strikes against civilian targets in Ukraine.
On Sunday, two ballistic missiles struck Sumy, a city in northern Ukraine, killing at least 35 people and injuring dozens. Scenes of carnage from the strike showed bodies slumped in the streets, amid the smoking ruins of destroyed vehicles and shattered buildings. Many of the victims of the first strike were making their way through streets bustling with people celebrating Palm Sunday, a holiday widely observed in Ukraine.
The second ballistic missile, which appears to have been carrying a cluster munitions warhead — designed to maximize casualties among “soft” targets, such as unarmored vehicles and personnel — struck as passersby and emergency workers responded to the first strike.
Deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, but the Russian military has an extensively documented history of carrying out so-called “double-tap” strikes on civilians and first responders in every conflict in which it participates.
The Russian military acknowledged firing two Iskander ballistic missiles at Sumy, but said it targeted a gathering of Ukrainian soldiers, killing 60 of them.
When asked about the strike in Sumy, Trump said he “was told they made a mistake,” without explaining who had told him that.
During a meeting with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at the White House on Monday, Trump was pressed by reporters to explain his claim that the strike was a mistake.
“The mistake was letting the war happen. If [former President Joe] Biden were competent, and if [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky were competent — and I don’t know that he is, we had a rough session with this guy over here, he just kept asking for more and more — that war should have never been allowed to happen,” Trump said.
When asked if he was willing to supply Kyiv with more Patriot air defense missiles, Trump suggested that Ukraine started the war — even though it began with repeated Russian invasions in 2014 and 2022. “When you start a war, you gotta know that you can win the war,” he said. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
The strike in Sumy followed another deadly attack directly targeting civilians on April 4 in Kryvyi Rih, which killed 19 —including nine children, most of whom were at a playground when the missile struck.
“The use of an explosive weapon with wide area effects by the Russian Federation in a densely populated area — and without any apparent military presence — demonstrates a reckless disregard for civilian life,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in the wake of the Kryvyi Rih attack.
Since taking power, the Trump administration has focused on reversing America’s stance in the conflict, withdrawing support for Ukraine in order to cozy up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. On March 18, the two leaders held a phone call that the White House trumpeted as a major diplomatic victory, saying that Moscow’s willingness to accede to a 30-day cease-fire against energy infrastructure was a sign of progress.
In reality, the Kremlin has been worried about the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s campaign against its oil production facilities.
“[The proposed cease-fire] followed a sharp escalation in Ukrainian deep-strike operations targeting Russian energy infrastructure in early 2025. In March alone, Ukraine struck at least seven energy sites in Russia — particularly in Samara, Ryazan, and Krasnodar — temporarily disrupting refining operations and driving up domestic fuel prices,” independent defense analyst Konrad Muzyka wrote in a recent report for his firm Rochan Consulting.
Since the agreement was reached, both sides have accused the other of breaching the terms of the deal.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refused to comment directly on the Sumy strike, saying simply: “The Russian Federation only hits military targets.”
Data from multiple conflicts over several decades contradicts Peskov’s claim, as do recent trends in Ukraine. March was one of the deadliest months for civilians in terms of air attacks in the war so far, with a sharp uptick in the number of daily attacks.
Last month, at least 164 civilians were killed and another 910 were injured as a result of Russian attacks, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a recent report. “The numbers constitute a 50 percent increase from February 2025 and a 71 percent increase compared with March 2024.”
Independent analysts have been tracking a notable increase in Russian drone operations.
“The tempo of Russian drone strikes rose sharply during March. Russian forces launched 4,198 Shahed-136/Geran-2 kamikaze drones — an over 1,100 percent increase compared to July 2024. This represents the highest monthly use of these drones to date,” Muzyka wrote.
Most of the casualties tracked by the U.N. were caused by missile strikes, drones, and the use of rockets and artillery against frontline settlements. There has also been a pattern of deliberate targeting of hospitals.
“In at least three separate incidents, loitering munitions [drones] struck operational hospitals in territory controlled by Ukraine, in Kharkiv and Sumy regions, resulting in damage to the facilities,” the authors of the U.N. report wrote. “In all three incidents multiple loitering munitions struck the same locations, raising the possibility that these hospitals were deliberately targeted.”
Muzyka of Rochan Consulting sees the pattern as likely to continue.
“Ukrainian sources estimate that Russia produced over 10,000 Geran-2 drones in 2024 and intends to boost production to 15,000 in 2025, enabling sustained high-tempo strikes throughout the year.”
Nevertheless, the U.S. continues to court Putin, with U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff carrying out shuttle diplomacy to Russia regardless of developments on the ground.
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” Witkoff told an interviewer recently. “I liked him. I thought he was straight up with me.”
Witkoff most recently met Putin in St. Petersburg on Friday, two days before the strike on Sumy. No major developments regarding the war in Ukraine were announced by either side as a result of that meeting, although Russia did release a Russian-American ballerina, who had been jailed for alleged “treason” after donating money to a Ukrainian charity, in exchange for a German-Russian citizen imprisoned by the U.S. for setting up a global smuggling ring to funnel sensitive electronics to the Russian military.
Nevertheless, Witkoff remains optimistic about his talks with Putin: “There is a possibility to reshape the Russian-United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities that I think give real stability to the region too.”
“The focus of the Trump administration is clearly on normalizing relations with Russia — something Trump has wanted since his first term but which was blocked by a less pliant Congress and officials — not on helping to create a just and lasting peace in Ukraine,” says Ruth Deyermond, a senior lecturer at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, who specializes in U.S.-Russia relations. However, she notes, “Ukraine and its European allies don’t seem minded to accept everything that Trump and Putin propose.”
Fundamentally, the war in Ukraine is not going well for either of the warring parties. Three years into the conflict, there have been nearly one million casualties, according to estimates by U.S. officials.
Across the nearly 500-mile line of contact, much of the war has devolved into attritional trench warfare. Ukraine’s military situation is dire, with the embattled nation unable to muster the manpower it needs to hold the line. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Russian soldiers are killed or wounded every day, eking out incremental gains. But tens of thousands more are sent to the front each month, to fight and die in Ukraine. Russia continues to advance, and is expected to begin a renewed offensive over the summer.
Against this backdrop, Zelensky warned that “Russian narratives” are taking over the discourse in the United States, in an interview with CBS News for 60 Minutes that was filmed before the strike on Sumy.
“How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war?” Zelensky said. “This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on U.S. politics and U.S. politicians.”
Zelensky has cause for complaint. Trump and his coterie have been keen to paint Ukraine — and Zelensky in particular — as the primary obstacle to peace, and have taken significant steps to withdraw aid and force Kyiv to the negotiating table on the White House’s terms.
While some observers parse the U.S. president’s social media posts for evidence of criticism of Russia, portraying it as “pressure,” Trump has not taken any concrete action against Putin.
Indeed, the most serious adverse effect he has achieved against the Kremlin was an indirect result of his botched tariff rollout, which caused oil prices to crash amid anticipated decline in demand. That sent benchmark Russian Urals export-grade crude oil prices plummeting to around $50 per barrel —when Moscow, which relies on energy revenue for 30 percent of its proceeds, assumed revenues at about $70 per barrel in its 2025 budget.
Despite posting such pablum as “Russia has to get moving” on a cease-fire, Trump regularly makes hyperbolic assertions about the inevitability of Putin’s victory at odds with observable reality, such as his claim on Sunday that “millions of people are dead” in the conflict and that “cities are being destroyed all over Ukraine, the whole culture is gone.”
Early Monday, Trump posted a rant on Truth Social disavowing responsibility for the conflict, describing it as “Biden’s war, not mine.”
“I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP,” he wrote. “If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened. Zelensky and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.”
Despite the president’s assertions, there is no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, and it is clear that Putin ordered his forces to invade Ukraine.
