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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Trump sympathizes with Putin that he could not quickly seize Ukraine because he himself made a strikingly similar mistake, — FT
📍The U.S. president excuses Putin’s failures in the failed assault on Kyiv — blaming stupid generals and mud.
📍Trump’s complaints about Russia’s failed offensive are quite revealing. In his version, no blame is placed on Putin. According to Trump, the failed invasion of Ukraine is the fault of an idiot-subordinate.
📍28 February 2026 — almost exactly four years after the start of Putin’s war in Ukraine — the United States and Israel struck Iran. The goal was to achieve the quickest possible regime change. However, Trump’s notion of a short, victorious war proved to be a mirage. And now he, like Putin, is forced to bear the burden of the consequences of his own mistake.
📍The sequence of events that brought the leaders of Russia and the United States to this moment also shows significant similarities. In both cases, early military victories led to dangerous overconfidence.
📍Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 met with little resistance from Ukraine or the broader international community. That may have convinced Putin that Zelensky’s government in Kyiv was a house of cards that would quickly collapse, and the outside world would again accept the fait accompli.
📍Trump ran his campaign as an opponent of overseas wars. But he was elated by the United States’ success in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, and then by the overthrow of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela earlier this year.
📍Both Putin and Trump centralized power and surrounded themselves with sycophants. The systems of governance they created proved unable to stop a leader intent on making a catastrophic mistake.
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