By cancelling the proposed meeting with Vladimir Putin in Budapest, President Trump may again contemplate whether threatening to arm Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles, capable of striking deep into Russia, will finally force Russia to the peace table.

Let’s examine the twists and turns of the U.S. position on the Ukrainian war in the last two months.

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On September 23, 2025, during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the U.N. General Assembly gathering, Trump suggested that Ukraine could win back all the territory seized by Russia. Less than a week later, on September 29, Vice President J.D. Vance was the first to suggest that the United States was seriously weighing Ukraine’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles to defend the country against Russian forces.

On the same day (September 29), General Keith Kellogg, U.S. Special Envoy on Ukraine, said that President Trump has authorized NATO members to deploy into non-NATO Ukraine offensive missile systems that the United States provided. Kellogg insisted that Trump had authorized NATO to strike deeply into Russia with missiles (supposedly Tomahawks) that the United States had brokered to NATO. Kellogg had to understand that authorizing NATO to strike Moscow with U.S. missiles would instantly transform the Ukraine war from a proxy war between Ukraine and Russia into a direct war between NATO and Russia, if not a direct war between the United States, NATO, and Russia.

That both Vance and Kellogg spoke on the same date suggests Kellogg was the author of the suggestion that Trump should supply Zelensky with Tomahawk missiles brokered by the United States to Ukraine through NATO.

On October 13, perhaps in response to the statements from Trump and others in his administration, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made a clear threat when he suggested we would return to the risk of nuclear war should Trump supply Tomahawk cruise missiles to Zelensky. “It’s been said a hundred times, in a manner understandable even to the star-spangled man, that it’s impossible to distinguish a nuclear Tomahawk missile from a conventional one in flight,” Medvedev said. “The delivery of these missiles could........

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