Making excuses for Putin

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Hours after 35 civilians were killed and more than a hundred wounded in a Russian ballistic missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, United States President Donald Trump called the attack a “horrible thing.”

He then caviled, saying it may have been a mistake and hazarding Russia didn’t mean to do it.

Trump’s comments on the deadliest single Russian strike in Ukraine this year stands in marked contrast not only to that of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — “only completely deranged scum can act like this,” he said — but it’s also at odds with his own special envoy Keith Kellogg.

Kellogg didn’t look for excuses, stating without hesitation that the Sumy strike “crosses any line of decency.”

Indeed, it did. And in a war that’s so far claimed the lives of at least 13,000 civilians, so too have many others.

The Kremlin denies deliberately targeting civilians, which is considered a war crime under international law. But Russia’s strikes have been well-documented — strikes on hospitals, schools, maternity wards, theaters … the list goes on. It’s an established military strategy for Moscow. It’s never a hearts-and-minds approach, rather always an iron fist.

Under different leadership, the Pentagon had no doubt about this. “We assess that Russia has deliberately struck civilian infrastructure and non-military targets, with the purpose of needlessly harming civilians and attempting to instill terror among [the] Ukrainian population,” U.S. military officials said back in 2022.

And that approach has continued, all with the goal of breaking Ukraine’s will to resist, demoralizing and exhausting its population and coercing them into throwing in the towel from mental and physical fatigue.

For example, that’s why Russia has been targeting the country’s energy system the past three years. As Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko told POLITICO in late 2022, as he prepared the city to endure a freezing winter under Russian assault: “They want to freeze us, destroy our electricity, our heating, our generators.” And they tried to do the same the two winters that followed.

The strike on Sumy wasn’t an error, aberration or mishap. The nature of it fits into Russia’s long-established tactics — striking the city’s downtown twice in what’s called a “double tap.” That’s when an initial strike is followed, after a pause, by a second, with the goal of killing or injuring rescuers and first responders who’ve rushed to the scene.

On Palm Sunday, the second missile followed five minutes after the first. That’s calculated.

Russian armed forces are notorious for using double taps on towns and cities. They did so in Syria time and again, targeting hospitals, markets and residential buildings in Aleppo and Idlib, with many White Helmet rescuers killed as a result. The tactic is similar to a sniper luring others into their kill zone by targeting an enemy soldier only to wound, hoping their cries prompt their comrades to come within range — but on a much bigger scale.

And then, as now, Russian officials had insisted their target was military. Following the Sumy strike, Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed the pair of Iskander-M tactical missiles were targeting a meeting of an “operational tactical group of Ukraine’s armed forces,” and that more than 60 Ukrainian combatants were killed. Of course, it was all Kyiv’s fault, as the ministry accused Ukrainian authorities of using civilians as human shields by placing military facilities in the center of a populated city.

That’s what Moscow often said about its strikes in Syria too, even when hitting street markets in the busy morning hours or targeting makeshift clinics and refugee camps — something I witnessed first-hand while reporting from the country’s north.

Vladimir Putin’s generals always wage total war: no holds-barred, no observance of what Moscow sees as sentimental international rules of war — hence, the egregious abuses in Bucha and Irpin.

It’s also how Putin waged war against Chechnya during his tenure as prime minister, when he oversaw a devastating bombing campaign that razed the breakaway republic’s capital Grozny in 1999, which forced more than 100,000 to flee.

All this is well-documented, so Trump glossing over what happened was presumably meant to avoid any direct verbal confrontation with the Kremlin — which he seemingly still hopes is serious about peace talks. But Sumy is further proof, if any were needed, that Putin is stringing him along, like he does with all peace talks until everything is on his terms. 

Back in March, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “Plan A is, get the shooting to stop,” and that Washington’s main goal was to secure a quick ceasefire before moving on to broader talks about permanently ending the war. But that isn’t what Putin has in mind, which he openly demonstrated by withholding his agreement to a full 30-day ceasefire — a truce Ukraine agreed to. And after his March phone call with Trump, there was hardly a pause before Russia launched a massive drone assault on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.

Offering a diplomatic bare minimum, the Russian leader did tell Trump he’d hold off on striking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for 30 days, but that was a self-serving concession with the harsh winter days now over. It also coincided with news that Ukraine had managed to dramatically increase the range of its powerful Neptune subsonic cruise missiles from 200 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers, which would enable Kyiv to hit oil refineries deep inside Russia.

Moreover, since that suspicious concession, there’s been no movement on Russia’s end, despite U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff’s chats with Putin. Their latest talk was last Friday, after which Witkoff again talked of how close he was to a breakthrough. We are on the “verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large,” he said.

But the Kremlin swiftly undercut his optimism, with Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling reporters there’s no clear outline of a U.S.-Russia deal on Ukraine — although, he said, there’s political will to move in that direction.

In the meantime, Ukrainians should duck and cover.