- RAWSTORY.COM - Raw Story - 30/Jul 00:02

Trump's stunning Putin admission shows 'reality is hitting': experts

Reality may be hitting President Donald Trump like a ton of bricks after Trump admitted Tuesday his threats against Russia "may not work."Trump, who boasted during the campaign that he could end the war in Ukraine by appealing to President Vladimir Putin, has threatened Russia with severe tariffs over the invasion. Trump told reporters Tuesday on Air Force One that the United States may impose "tariffs and stuff" after 10 days. But the usually confident Trump didn't appear confident that his strategy would work.“I don’t know if it’s going to affect Russia, because he wants to, obviously, probably keep the war going,” Trump said. “But we’re going to put on tariffs and the various things you put on. It may or may not affect them. But it could.”The New York Times on Tuesday wrote that Trump’s threats "raised questions about how much leverage the United States has with Moscow — and whether Mr. Trump is willing to use it."“Trump seems to be realizing what a lot of us observed from early on — that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr]Zelensky is not the problem,” Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, told the Times. “Ukraine is not the problem. Putin is the problem.”Duss added that Trump “obviously had great confidence in his own deal-making abilities,” but that "reality seems to be hitting.”Evelyn Farkas, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, told the outlet that while Trump “has a lot of cards up his sleeve” to take on Russia — including legislation that would levy hefty sanctions on Russian imports — negotiating with Putin is another animal.“He thought that he and his negotiators could talk Russia into some kind of compromise, but Putin is not interested in compromise,” Farkas said. “And so he’s going to keep on fighting until he realizes that he can’t achieve his objectives using military force. At the end of the day, he has to be convinced that he’s losing, and his people around him need to be convinced of that.”The White House told the Times in a statement that Trump “wants to stop the killing, which is why he is selling American-made weapons to NATO members and threatening Putin with biting tariffs and sanctions.”