Trumpe, tuci gadove.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/04/europe/trump-ukraine-war-nuclear-threat-latam-intl
But it is in the last fortnight that Trump’s decisions – and realizations – have turned this into a problem he now owns. He has seen Putin does not want peace. He has seen that Ukraine urgently needs arms, and he tried to help, albeit in a lackluster way. He made the remarkable choice of responding to the usually dismissed nuclear saber-rattling of former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, with harder nuclear threats about positioning US nuclear submarines closer to Russia. The US went from pausing military aid to Ukraine to threatening nuclear force against Russia in less than a month.
As this week ends, with Trump’s shortened deadline for a peace deal coming into view, he must make perhaps the most consequential decision of the conflict yet. Does he impose penalties – secondary tariffs against Russia’s energy customers – that really hurt? Does he accept the US and its allies might need to endure a little pain economically, to inflict pain?
Imposing serious secondary sanctions on India and China could roil the global energy market. Trump posted Monday he would be increasing tariffs on India because it was selling Russian crude on at a profit, and he didn’t “care how many people are being killed by the Russian War Machine,” although he did not provide details as to the new measures. India has not made it publicly clear if it intends to stop buying Russian energy products. China is utterly dependent on Russian oil and gas and simply cannot afford to stop buying it.