President Donald Trump’s seemingly infinite patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin may, in fact, have limits.

“Something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform this week, citing the massive recent airstrikes on Ukrainian cities and Putin’s desire to conquer “ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it.”

Trump also took a vague shot at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (“everything out of his mouth causes problems”), and one could point out that Russia has been striking civilian targets in Ukraine and expressing a desire to snuff out Ukraine’s political independence since the very beginning of the war.

Trump followed up by telling reporters he is considering imposing new sanctions on Russia and posted, “if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia,” but told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that he is holding off on new sanctions for now.

So it’s not as if Trump has had a full and sudden change of heart overnight. But consider that, at the end of February, Trump was publicly dressing down Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, blaming Ukraine for starting the war, and halting all US assistance to the Ukrainian war effort. By that standard, Trump’s new tone is still one of several developments that add up to a welcome change of pace for Kyiv.

Even if there are no new measures taken to either support Ukraine or punish Russia, and even if the US “walks away” from efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, as Vice President JD Vance recently threatened, the events since February still amount to a remarkable diplomatic change of fortune for Ukraine — and probably about as good an outcome as Kyiv could reasonably expect from this administration.

What hasn’t changed: Sanctions, intelligence, and (so far) weapons

For Ukraine, where cities are still reeling from some of the largest airstrikes since the beginning of the war, and where supplies of much-needed air defense ammunition are running dangerously low, there’s obviously no cause for celebration. Hanna Shelest, a Kyiv-based defense analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis, told Vox that despite Trump’s changing tone on Putin, his ongoing attacks on Zelenskyy (it’s unclear exactly what remarks triggered Trump’s ire) indicate that “we are still in a transactional situation.........

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