Trump tells Americans what Putin wants them to hear

Donald Trump's Russia policy has been sounding very familiar to the Kremlin.

Since Trump's phone call with Vladimir Putin on Feb. 12, their first direct contact since Trump's return to office, there's been a shift in US rhetoric that has seen the president begin to echo specific Russian talking points on the war in Ukraine, according to a Bloomberg analysis of his public comments.

Bloomberg used a Large Language Model to scan more than 300 of Trump's public comments between August 2024 and mid-March as well as more than 3,000 social media posts from the president and members of his administration since the start of 2025. The technique allows for comparing meaning across large volumes of text, even if the specific wording differs.

The results, which were reviewed by reporters, showed a correlation between Trump administration contacts with Putin and subsequent comments that echoed the Russian leader's own positions on subjects including the occupation, Kyiv's goal of joining NATO and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's political legitimacy.

Brian Hughes, a spokesman for Trump's National Security Council, said: "It's embarrassing the media is using outdated and stale democrat talking points in an attempt to disrupt President Trump's efforts to bring a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine."

Detailed information about Trump's private conversations with Putin is scarce, but European leaders including Germany's Olaf Scholz have said that the Russian leader tends to repeat his public positions on Ukraine at length in their calls.

"Trump parrots Putin," said Fiona Hill, who served as the top Russia adviser on the US National Security Council in the president's first term. "He wants to get close to Putin."

Trump is seeking to unlock tens of billions of dollars in potential business deals by remaking the economic relationship between the US and Russia. And to do that he needs to resolve the war in Ukraine.

As a consequence, the US has made concession after concession to Putin, even offering to recognize Crimea as part of Russia, a Kremlin demand since it occupied the Black Sea peninsula in 2014 that successive administrations — including in Trump's first term — have rejected.

And yet the peace deal that Trump had promised early in his term has still not materialized and the president is getting frustrated. "It makes me think that maybe he doesn't want to stop the war, he's just tapping me along," Trump said April 26 in a social media post.

Putin, for his part, has a simple goal, Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said: "To make friends with Trump."

The Russian leader has also taken to echoing his US counterpart. Putin has encouraged Trump's claims on Greenland, a semi-autonomous island that's part of NATO ally Denmark, and repeated Trump's unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in Joe Biden's 2020 victory.

A few days after Trump was sworn into office in January, Putin told a Russian state TV interviewer: "I cannot but agree with him that if he had been president, if his victory had not been stolen from him in 2020, then maybe there would not have been the Ukraine crisis that broke out in 2022."

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn't respond to a request for comment.

"The media seemingly is advocating more death and more destruction in this unnecessary war that wouldn't have started if President Trump was in office," Hughes, the NSC spokesman, said. "Russia didn't dare invade a neighbor during President Trump's first term yet did so under Biden and Obama. President Trump is taking action to clean up their mistakes."

A new period of direct US contact with the Russian president began around Feb. 11 when Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff had the first of several lengthy meetings with Putin.

Trump and Putin spoke by phone for about 90 minutes on Feb. 12. The following day, Trump ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine and said that Kyiv's aspirations to join the alliance had caused the war.

Putin's demand that Ukraine never join NATO has been a central aim of his February 2022 invasion even as the attack spurred Sweden and Finland to join the defense alliance, greatly expanding its border with Russia. The US under President Joe Biden and its European allies said Ukraine had a sovereign right to apply for membership, which they supported even as NATO never set a date for entry.

Five days later, Witkoff traveled to Saudi Arabia for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Trump, meanwhile, raised another Kremlin talking point in comments to reporters, criticizing martial law imposed in response to the Russian invasion and calling Zelenskiy a "dictator without elections."

While Putin has repeatedly denied Zelenskiy's legitimacy since the Ukrainian president's term formally expired in May 2024, the analysis shows that Trump only began raising the issue after he'd spoken to the Russian leader.

Ukraine cannot legally hold elections under the martial law that was imposed following the Russian invasion.

Another day later — and a week after their conversation — Trump also mimicked Putin's claim that Zelenskiy had extremely low approval ratings even as it was demonstrably untrue. A Ukrainian opinion poll conducted immediately after Trump's remarks showed Zelenskiy's trust rating among respondents rose to 65% from 57% the previous month. Only Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former top military commander who's now Ukraine's ambassador to the UK, scored higher.

The Kremlin seems to have "been successful to a large extent in shaping Trump's views on Ukraine," said Gabriel Gatehouse, author of "The Coming Storm," a book which investigated how conspiracy theories shaped the US political landscape.

Witkoff's second meeting with Putin was on March 13. Following that conversation he gave an extensive interview to Tucker Carlson, a Trump enthusiast who interviewed Putin himself at length in February 2024.

Witkoff told Carlson the US is "at war with Russia through our proxy Ukraine" and that occupied Ukrainian territories had held "referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule."

Again, those arguments echoed Putin's long held public positions, which he articulated frequently, including at a BRICS summit Oct. 18.

"NATO is fighting us, but they are fighting this proxy war using Ukrainian soldiers," Putin told reporters there. "We asked the opinion of the people themselves and held referendums," Putin told Russian Foreign Ministry officials in June 2024 as he sought to justify the illegal occupation of parts of Ukraine. "We did what the people decided."

Actually, Russia organized those votes after its invasion of eastern and southern Ukraine sent millions of residents fleeing the fighting. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the referendums a "violation of the UN Charter and international law," and other nations refused to recognize the results.

While Trump and his team are evidently echoing Putin's talking points, it's unclear whether that's the result of Kremlin influence or their own determination to end the war at all costs, according to one former US official. Witkoff isn't naive about Putin, the official said.

After Witkoff's visit, Trump posted on Truth Social on March 14 that he'd "strongly requested" Putin to spare thousands of Ukrainian soldiers he said were "completely surrounded." Kyiv had denied televised claims by Putin two days earlier that Ukrainian troops were encircled in fighting in Russia's Kursk region and being "systematically destroyed."

Putin responded within hours to the "appeal by the US President," telling a meeting of his Security Council that Ukrainians who surrendered would be spared. Trump later claimed his action had saved the Ukrainian soldiers.

Putin's claims on Crimea and the four partially occupied regions of eastern and southern Ukraine resurfaced in the US media after Witkoff's third meeting with Putin on April 11.

"This peace deal is about these so-called five territories," Witkoff told Fox News.

Trump himself picked up Putin's narrative once again on April 14 when he told reporters in the Oval Office that Ukraine had started a conflict which had, in fact, begun with the Russian invasion.

"You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles," he said, complaining about Zelenskiy's repeated requests for weapons.

To be sure, Trump's growing impatience to seal a peace deal has also prompted him occasionally to criticize Putin. After at least 12 people were killed when Russia unleashed its biggest air attack on Ukraine so far this year, Trump called the bombardment "not necessary" on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, adding: "Vladimir, STOP!"

But a day earlier, Vice President JD Vance had been underscoring Putin's territorial argument, telling reporters in India that "the current lines, somewhere close to them is where you're ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict."

On Friday, Witkoff was in Moscow for further talks with Putin as Trump pushed to seal a peace settlement as soon as possible. The White House said Trump had a "productive" meeting with Zelenskiy at the Vatican on Saturday, where they attended the funeral of Pope Francis.

"It's just manipulation 101," Hill said. "They're giving it as a masterclass."