In President Trump’s colourful start to his second term, yesterday was another rather emotional day, with many newspapers reporting that Trump had claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi was the dictator who started the war in Ukraine. And many on social media reacted in their typical emotional way: people promoting Russian war propaganda (more of them among Trump supporters) praised Trump’s statements and those promoting Ukrainian/Western war propaganda were appalled at how Trump is in Putin’s pocket and is now promoting Putin’s war propaganda. This group usually includes all leftists and believers in the mainstream media propaganda, one of whom recently accused me of being a “Putin’s troll” when I published Trump’s VP J.D. Vance’s speech criticizing Europe on Facebook and my YouTube channel (the speech has already racked up nearly 30,000 views).

For me, these reactions are mostly amusing, because again, most of the audience misses what’s really going on here. I said in one of my Facebook/X posts that “reading the headlines in the papers, it often feels as if Trump is pulling journalists and European leaders like rams on strings while they are in a daze about what is going on.” Indeed, less than a month earlier, I bought the 22 January edition of the Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, although I am not in the habit of wasting my money on junk journalism like that of Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat, which is often nothing more than politically motivated leftist propaganda. But I bought that paper precisely because I could predict that soon Trump would be accused once again of being Putin’s agent (an accusation that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats first put on 24/7 mass media airwaves after losing the 2016 election). The headline in the paper read, “‘Destroys Russia’: Trump talks tough on Putin.” Below are two headlines from the same publication, published only a month apart (on the left the headline says that Trump is “in Putin’s pocket” and on the right it says that “he will destroy Russia”).

Is President Trump really such a windbag that while last month he threatened to destroy Putin’s Russia, this month he is already in his pockets? Or is it that journalists and European decision-makers are once again missing Trump’s leadership style of getting the upper hand in negotiations to get the best outcome? And by ‘best’ I mean best from the point of view of the US, Europe and Ukraine. More precisely, Trump did not threaten to destroy Russia, but said that Putin himself would be the one that is destroying Russia.

This was actually a much wiser move, because the first mentioned could have been interpreted in Russia as a US declaration of war against Russia. But now Trump weakened Putin’s own position in Russia and turned many Russians against him, because Trump is also much more respected among Russians than other Western leaders like Joe Biden. I quote below comments by British-American financier Sir Bill Browder in an interview with Times Radio:

– Where do you think we are now, what’s next. What’s the next step for Donald Trump?

– I don’t want to be too sure… because it’s almost impossible to predict. Donald Trump will go one way. and then the other way and then the other way again. But we’ll try to draw some conclusions…. People like me sat here after his election terrified that he might sell Ukraine down the river and that was the fear of his inauguration. But something unexpected happened…. when they talked about ending the war, he said Vladimir Zelenskyi is ready to negotiate. He said the war has been terrible, with a lot of death and destruction on both sides. He said that Putin’s economy is doing badly. Then he said the most interesting thing – that he wasn’t sure whether Putin would negotiate or not. He also posted on social media that if Putin did not negotiate, he would impose tariffs, taxes and sanctions on Russia which was not at all in the same tone as the bromance stuff we saw when Trump was president before. Then the third thing, and I think this is very significant: he said he would start putting pressure on the Saudis and others to lower the price of oil. Because if the price of oil is down, Russia would not be able to afford a war and all this sounds to people like me like he has not abandoned Ukraine, that he has put Putin in charge and that he is going to put pressure on Putin now. I don’t think we should draw too many conclusions because anything can happen, but at least in the first couple of days after he took office it seems that Ukraine is still on Donald’s mind.

– Trump was also asked shortly after his inauguration about Vladimir Putin and he said he was not doing very well, and implied that the war had not made him look very good, that Putin was “destroying Russia”. How do you think those comments were received in the Kremlin?

Certainly not well. Not well, and I would argue that it has been humiliating for Putin to have the most powerful man in the free world, Donald Trump, saying things like that. What’s also interesting is Putin’s reaction, because Putin really doesn’t like being humiliated. He sees himself as a strong man, an alpha male, someone who won’t be pushed around. And then all of a sudden he’s being pushed, he’s being slandered, he thinks by Donald Trump. He’s being pressured by Donald Trump and that’s not something he would normally allow. But instead of reacting negatively, he ignored it. He did a very unusual thing, which was that he stated that he believes that Donald Trump is a very smart man, a very powerful man and most interestingly, he said that he believes that the 2000 presidential election in the United States was stolen from Donald Trump, as Donald Trump of course believes himself to be. So this alpha male Vladimir Putin instantly became a beta male. He ignored the ultimatum and started flattering Donald Trump. Did it work, or didn’t it? What does it mean? Nobody knows, but it will be interesting to see how Vladimir Putin subordinates himself to Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin said that if victory had not been stolen from Trump in 2020, there might not have been a Ukraine crisis in 2022.

So anyone who still has eyes and brains can see what’s really going on here. Trump is humiliating both Putin and President Vladimir Zelenskyi in order to undermine their popularity in both Ukraine and Russia, so that these leaders will be more amenable to the peace terms dictated by the US. If President Trump does not act in this way, the peace talks could drag on for several years, with neither side accepting the other’s peace terms. Sir Bill Browder’s comments left me a little unclear as to how a fall in oil prices would negatively affect Putin’s war, so I asked the AI:

A significant drop in oil prices as a result of decisions by Saudi Arabia or other major producing countries (such as the United Arab Emirates) would affect the Russian economy and thus Putin’s war campaign in Ukraine in several ways:

1.Russian state finances would deteriorate.

• Russia is highly dependent on oil and gas revenues, which form a significant part of the country’s budget. In 2023, oil and gas sales brought Russia around 30-40% of state budget revenues.
• If oil prices fall significantly, this will reduce Russian export revenues, which could force the government to cut spending or increase the budget deficit.

2. Russia’s ability to finance war is weakened.

• Military operations in Ukraine continue to require large amounts of money: weapons, military equipment, salaries and logistics.
• If state revenues fall, the Putin administration will find it more difficult to sustain military operations without cutting other budget lines or taking on more debt.
• Russia has already had to use its previously accumulated funds to finance the war, so a fall in oil revenues could further exacerbate economic pressures.

3. Ruble depreciation and inflation.

• Lower oil revenues are likely to lead to a depreciation of the ruble, which in turn will push up the prices of imported goods in Russia.
• This could spur inflation and cause further economic problems for businesses and consumers alike.

4. Kremlin forced to make difficult choices

• If there is not enough money for both warfare and domestic political stability (e.g. pensions, public services, maintenance of the administration), Putin will have to prioritise.
• This can either weaken popular support for war or cause political friction within the elite as certain groups suffer budget cuts.

5. Long-term geopolitical implications

• If Saudi Arabia and OPEC+ (including Russia) cannot reach an agreement to limit oil production, Russia’s influence in OPEC+ may be weakened.
• Saudi Arabia could use lower oil prices as a geopolitical weapon to pressure Russia to, for example, reduce its support for Iran or even seek a solution to end the war.

Conclusion

If Saudi Arabia decided to increase its oil production and push down prices, it would put the Russian economy and thus Putin’s war effort under significant pressure. This would not necessarily end the war immediately, but it could force Russia to reduce its military efforts, speed up ceasefire or peace talks or re-prioritise its resources, undermining its ability to continue its long war of attrition against Ukraine.

Most people react to the news about President Trump in a very emotional way rather than understanding his far-sighted and strategic thinking. As the late Trump prophet Kim Clement predicted about this man in 2016:“This man is not held in high regard, but he is a genius.” He is a genius because he knows what trump card to use to pressure world leaders to dance to his tune. This is why most leaders always come second to him because they never learn the rules of his playbook.

I’m not saying that he is some “4D chess playing” demigod figure who never makes mistakes. We saw him lose to his enemies back in 2020 even though the election was stolen from him. At the time, I often expressed somewhat unrealistic hopes that he would eventually pull the long straw and the election would be overturned and Trump would be returned to office in the middle of Biden’s term. I was wrong about this because Trump was no demigod chess master who ran a mysterious Q intelligence group to tell his followers to “trust the plan” (as that Q conspiracy cult believed and whose beliefs I never promoted myself). So President Trump has made mistakes and will continue to make them. We can criticise his decisions and policies without falling into the “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. But before people are loosing their minds by every possible “outrageous” comment by Trump, I wish they would first control their minds and get a little more familiar with what it’s really all about.

I’ll end by quoting a text that I also published on Facebook on this topic:

A FB friend asked me in a private message for my opinion on the latest Trump controversy where he accused Ukraine of starting a war. Those promoting Putin’s war propaganda are cheering and those promoting Zelensky/Western war propaganda are again loudly excoriating what a crazy man Trump is. But I think both groups are again missing what this is really about: the art of the deal, the art of negotiation, as in Trump’s Gaza proposal. I quote from a comment I already put to a FB friend in a private message:

I wouldn’t pay as much attention to that as journalists often do. After all, this is the first time Trump would claim something like this. In his comments and interviews to date, Trump’s views on the war have been as follows.

1. Russia started a war that was a moral wrong.
2. Putin started it under Biden because of Biden’s weakness, which he showed, for example, in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump often said that it was the Afghanistan fiasco that also encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine.
3. Putin would never have invaded Ukraine during his presidency because, among other things, he had phoned Putin that if he dared to do so, he would bomb Moscow. Trump also imposed tough sanctions on the construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, which Biden again dismantled. Both the Ukrainian and Polish governments had warned Biden that lifting the sanctions would jeopardise Ukraine’s security and soon after Russia invaded Ukraine.
4. Trump often said that if there was no compromise and peace soon, the war would escalate into a nuclear World War III between Russia and NATO.
5. Trump also said that he wanted to prevent any more Ukrainians from dying in the war, and since there are far fewer Ukrainians than Russian soldiers, eventually the country would run out of soldiers after they fell in battle. The US wasted billions of taxpayers’ money to support a bloody war with no clear geopolitical strategy for what it was ultimately intended to support.
   But according to Trump, prolonging the war would not be in the interests of Ukraine, Europe or the US, which I fully agree with the Trump administration.

If he is now blaming Zelensky or Ukraine for starting the war, I think it is part of Trump’s typical negotiating tactics. It is intended to give the Ukrainian leadership the impression that the US would abandon Ukraine entirely as a means of putting pressure on Zelenski unless he agrees to the peace terms dictated by the US.

This does not mean that Trump will let Russia off the hook and let Putin alone dictate the peace terms. In all likelihood, he will also use some form of intimidation against Putin to get him to agree to peace terms dictated by the US.

When my FB friend went on to say “don’t I see any danger in Trump and Putin making a deal and agreeing to mutually beneficial delineation of interests”, I replied:

Well, if you look at it from a purely historical perspective, every war in the history of the world has either ended with one side winning and totally humiliating the other. Or else to the fact that neither has not got a clear victory over the other and therefore the war has ended in a compromise solution. It is the latter that the Trump administration is now pursuing because the stated ambitions of the previous administration and many European leaders for total victory in Ukraine are simply not a realistic prospect. After all, Finland did not win the Winter and Continuation Wars even though we retained our independence. But we lost Karelia, Petsamo and Old Salla in the war. Similarly, if Ukraine today loses part of its territory to Russia in the peace agreement brokered by Trump, it would not be historically exceptional at all.