The Trump administration is giving Russian President Vladimir Putin one more chance to show he\u2019s serious about ending his 41-month-old invasion of Ukraine.
As more than six months have passed with no diplomatic progress, well-placed sources tell The Post special envoy Steve Witkoff has been encouraged to take a sterner approach with Moscow\u2019s leader ahead of Wednesday\u2019s make-or-break meeting \u2014 in line with President Trump\u2019s recent expressions of disgust at Putin\u2019s continued attacks on Ukrainian civilians.
Whether Witkoff will take that advice remains unclear.
A spokesperson for the special envoy declined to comment on the record for this story.
Meanwhile, the White House national security team responsible for the Ukraine war held multiple meetings on Tuesday, trying to work out how Washington might best persuade Russia to silence its guns, according to people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump himself said Tuesday he would wait to see how the sitdown went before making a final decision on whether to enact secondary sanctions and slapping more tariffs on countries that provide Russia with its main source of income: oil purchases.
\u201cWe have a meeting with Russia tomorrow, we\u2019re going to see what happens. We\u2019ll make a determination at that time,\u201d said the president, before denying that he had promised to set the additional rates at 100% \u2014 as he appeared to suggest last month.
\u201cI never said a percentage, but we\u2019ll be doing quite a bit of that. We\u2019ll see what happens over the next fairly short period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A source familiar with discussions insisted that sanctions are not inevitable when Trump\u2019s deadline is reached Friday, saying the administration is \u201cpushing hard for a deal. That\u2019s always the president\u2019s preferred outcome.\u201d
As part of his prep, Witkoff has been briefed on the historical motivations behind Putin\u2019s war on Ukraine \u2014 namely his desire to reconstitute as much of the former Soviet Union as possible, according to a US official.
Last month, as Trump\u2019s rhetoric toward Moscow began to toughen, Special Presidential Envoy to Ukraine retired Gen. Keith Kellogg said that the president \u201cnow realizes that Putin is not a business partner.\u201d
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The commander in chief \u2014 so often praised for his businesslike, transactional approach to politics \u2014 is up against a ruler who represents the opposite of that approach.
That\u2019s why the earlier, more cordial approach \u2014 complete with Witkoff jovially greeting Putin at the Kremlin \u2014 did not work, according to one source. Subsequent offers of reduced sanctions and off-ramps for Russia to end its war were also not enough to persuade Moscow to change its calculus.
Russia, for its part, is hoping for more of the same. Witkoff\u2019s Wednesday trip comes at the behest of the Kremlin, which invited the envoy after Trump threatened to levy the secondary sanctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, as Trump\u2019s words toward Putin have grown increasingly harsh, Kremlin thought leaders have been denigrating the US president on X.
Russian philosopher and Putin confidant Alexander Dugin declared Monday that Trump was crazy, an about-face from a year ago, when Dugin \u2014 nicknamed \u201cPutin\u2019s brain\u201d for his purported heavy influence on the Russian leader \u2014 endorsed Trump for president in 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Trump administration is giving Russian President Vladimir Putin one more chance to show he\u2019s serious about ending his 41-month-old invasion of Ukraine. As more than six months have passed with no diplomatic progress, well-placed sources tell The Post special envoy Steve Witkoff has been encouraged to take a sterner approach with Moscow\u2019s leader ahead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.funminews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/images-46.jpeg?fit=690%2C388&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15788,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15787\/revisions\/15788"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.funminews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}