This has been building for a while. We’ve seen Trump slowly start to criticise Putin more and more. And the reason is simple; Putin is making him look bad.

Ending the war in Ukraine was a key promise of Trump’s campaign. He cast the Dems as ignorant bloodthirsty warmongers who only knew how to shovel money into the death machine, while he was the savvy deal maker who would end the war in a day.

One of Trump’s biggest problems is that he buys his own hype. I think he really did believe that Ukraine was only an ongoing issue because no one had really tried to sit down and hash out a deal with Russia. And of course, with his cozy relationship with Putin, he was just the guy to do it.

But there is no deal to be made. The things Ukraine wants and the things Russia wants are fundamentally incompatible. There’s no middle ground between “I want to exist” and “I want for you not to exist.” And Putin’s claims of wanting to come to the table have only ever been a smoke screen.

So now Trump looks like a fucking moron because the “easy” deal he claimed he’d get isn’t happening, and Putin keeps on thumbing his nose at the US by flagrantly violating every agreement he makes.

For Putin, pissing off Trump doesn’t matter. He’s already got what he needs out of him. Trump was only ever a Russian asset in the sense that they knew that getting him into power would accelerate the USA’s decline. They’re not calling up and sending him orders every day. They don’t need to. As another commenter here brilliantly put it, “Trump is a fire-and-forget idiot.”

But there’s at least some hope that this break with Putin might see him turn to supporting Ukraine purely out of spite. He’s done pettier things for less reason.