You Won’t Believe Who Trump Blames for Russia Attacking Ukraine (2025)

Donald Trump went back to blaming basics Monday to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin, less than a day after Russia’s deadliest attack on Ukraine this year: He’s blaming the leader of the country that got bombed—and Joe Biden!

A Russian double-tap missile strike on Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, Sunday reportedly killed 34 people, including two children, and injured 117 others.

In a post on Truth Social Monday morning, Trump presented his own spin on the deadly attack, and seemed particularly anxious to deflect blame from himself and Putin.

“The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine,” Trump wrote. “I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening. President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP.”

Trump has repeatedly attempted to wash his hands of his unwavering support for Putin during his first term in the White House and his lack of assistance for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, which emboldened Moscow and weakened Kyiv, making way for Russia to launch its deadly multiyear ground offensive in Ukraine in 2022.

Trump’s continued rhetoric now serves to normalize Russian aggression and put the onus on anyone else for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In his post Monday, Trump blamed the president of the country that was attacked and his old standby, Biden.

“If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened,” Trump continued. “President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!”

Trump continues to harp on the past, despite claiming to have actively seized the helm on negotiations on behalf of Russia and Ukraine. When asked about the deadly attack on civilians, on Air Force One Sunday, Trump claimed that he’d been told it was “a mistake.” Notably, Putin’s name did not appear in his post about the attack.

Crucially, Trump isn’t actually working to get the war to stop—he’s simply trying to make a buck. Trump’s so-called peace talks have splintered into a range of tangents in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Belgium. Meanwhile, in Washington, Ukrainian and U.S. officials have been working on a dense rare-earth minerals contract, which Trump has made clear is a necessary feature of any U.S.-brokered peace talks as a way of paying the U.S. back for military aid that he didn’t even approve.

Some critics posit that running multiple channels of negotiations is a tactic Moscow hopes will buy it more time—which they seem to believe is on their side, according to CNN.

The European Commission is issuing burner phones to officials traveling to the United States amid fears of espionage in Trump’s America.

It’s the kind of security measure typically saved for trips to China or the Ukraine, where the fear of IT surveillance is high. But three European Commissioners will test out burner phones and basic laptops at International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington next week, sources told the Financial Times.

The move from the European Commission, the primary executive arm of the European Union, marks a new era of American-European relations, which have all but dissipated since Donald Trump took office in January. Last month, he slapped Europe with 20 percent tariffs, which he later reduced to 10 percent for 90 days. He has falsely claimed the EU was formed solely to “create a unified force against” the United States, he abandoned Ukraine in the face of Russia, and he threatened to withdraw American security guarantees to the continent altogether—single-handedly dismantling an alliance that has shaped the global order since Word War II, and simultaneously embracing Vladimir Putin’s alliance.

“The transatlantic alliance is over,” an EU official told the Financial Times.

The Commission did not confirm the issuing of burner phones to the Financial Times, but it did say that all EU officials traveling to the U.S. were told to turn off their phones and hide them in “special sleeves” at the border amid a rise in phone seizures from border agents in recent weeks. A number of tourists and visiting academics have been turned away for having criticism of the White House on their phone.

Donald Trump’s administration has a new excuse for violating an order from the Supreme Court to return a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

In a seven-page filing Sunday, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued that the federal courts did not have the authority to order the executive branch to “conduct foreign relations” with another country, by facilitating the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father in Maryland who was deported to El Salvador despite having received a protective order prohibiting his removal there.

The lawyers argued that the department could not be compelled to actually “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia because “reading ‘facilitate’ as requiring something more than domestic measures would not only flout the Supreme Court’s order but also violate the separation of powers. The federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations.”

Instead, the Justice Department was choosing to understand “facilitate” as “taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here.”

The government argued that the court could not compel it to make demands of El Salvador’s government, dispatch U.S. personnel, or send aircraft into foreign airspace.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had ordered the government to report “what it can” about its ongoing efforts to return Abrego Garcia, and ordered the government to provide daily updates about its progress. In a separate filing, the government confirmed that Abrego Garcia was “alive and secure,” but in its filing Sunday, it argued it could not be compelled to report information on the case.

The government claimed Xinis’s request was “particularly inappropriate given that such discovery could interfere with ongoing diplomatic discussions—particularly in the context of President [Nayib] Bukele’s ongoing trip to the United States.”

Bukele, who struck a $6 million deal with Trump to house alleged gang members the U.S. government wishes to deport, arrived in the U.S. Sunday, according to the filing.

The White House is trying to use semantics to dodge the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that it has to help return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States from El Salvador.

At a press conference Friday, Newsmax’s Mike Carter asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s coming visit to the White House on Monday and whether Trump wanted Bukele to bring Abrego Garcia with him. Leavitt’s response was not encouraging.

“The Supreme Court made their ruling last night very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to facilitate the return, not to effectuate the return,” Leavitt replied.

It’s true that the high court ruled the Trump administration must abide by a lower court ruling to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia. But focusing on this language ignores the bigger point that both courts ruled against the administration.

The government was barred from returning Abrego Garcia to his native El Salvador due to his life being in danger from gangs, before ICE chose to deport him anyway. Administration officials continue to insist that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member but failed to provide any evidence to that effect, as earlier court rulings had found. Abrego Garcia does not have a criminal record and is married to a U.S. citizen and the father of a child with autism.