As Vladimir Putin pledges to retaliate against Ukraine for last weekend’s unprecedented drone attack, Kremlin advisers and figures around Donald Trump have told the US president that the risk of a nuclear confrontation is growing, in an attempt to pressure him to further reduce US support for Ukraine.
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After a phone call between the two leaders on Wednesday, Trump said: “President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”
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“The risk levels are going way up,” Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told Fox News. “When you attack an opponent’s part of their [nuclear] triad, your risk level goes up because you don’t know what the other side is going to do. And that’s what they did.”
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Other current and former members of the administration skeptical of US support for Ukraine have also vocally opposed the drone strikes.
“It is not in America’s interest for Ukraine to be attacking Russia’s strategic nuclear forces the day before another round of peace talks,” said Dan Caldwell, an influential foreign policy adviser who was a senior aide to Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon until he was purged amid a scandal over leaks last month.
“This has the potential to be highly escalatory and raises the risk of direct confrontation between Russia and Nato,” he said. “US should not only distance itself from this attack but end any support that could directly or indirectly enable attacks against Russian strategic nuclear forces.”