“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled, sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while,” Trump said alongside Merz, adding that he’d related that analogy to Putin in the call.

The passive approach was a setback for Merz, who sat with Trump on Thursday hoping to spark a more robust White House backing for Kyiv against Russia. Merz has vowed a more active German approach to the conflict in his first month on the job, promising a massive increase in defense spending.

Instead of going along with Merz, Trump continued his pattern of speaking of the Russian war in Ukraine as though he were a passive commentator. The president had a telephone call with Putin on Wednesday. Afterward, he wrote on social media that it was a good talk, “but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace. President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”

The passive tone was widely interpreted in Russia as a tacit endorsement of Moscow’s right to strike back, although Trump on Thursday said that he had told Putin that “I don’t like it. I said, ‘Don’t do it. You shouldn’t do it. You should stop it.’ But again, there’s a lot of hatred.”

European efforts to secure Trump’s support for Ukraine will continue in the coming weeks, first at a meeting of Group of 7 leaders in Canada and then at a NATO summit in the Netherlands at the end of the month.

But Trump administration officials have offered caution about Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia, warning that the weekend drone effort would likely be escalatory because it hit at the country’s sensitive nuclear program.

“I’m telling you, the risk levels are going way up — I mean, what happened this weekend,” retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, told Fox News on Tuesday. “People have to understand in the national security space: When you attack an opponent’s part of their national survival system, which is their triad, the nuclear triad, that means your risk level goes up because you don’t know what the other side is going to do.”

MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk warned on X, where he has about 5 million followers, that the most important event in the world right now is the war between Ukraine and Russia. “Most people aren’t paying attention, but we’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since this began in 2022.”

Trump on Wednesday also thanked Putin for assistance in the thorny negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, offering comments that in Russia were interpreted as supportive of the Kremlin more generally.

“What happened was an obvious trade-off, Ukraine for Iran,” said Abbas Galyamov, a political consultant and former Putin speechwriter. “It looks like Putin phoned in with this proposal, essentially saying — don’t prevent me from dealing with Ukraine, and I will help you deal with Iran.”

On Thursday, Iranian state media reported that a trip by Putin to Tehran is in the works. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in a briefing Thursday, emphasized Russia’s “close partnership” with Iran and its readiness “to take advantage of that to facilitate and contribute” to U.S. negotiations.

The Trump-Putin phone call is the latest round in the struggle between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for Trump’s backing in the war as each strives to portray the other as the obstacle to peace.

Trump is “leaning toward” faulting Zelensky for escalating the conflict, argued pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov.

“That is why he called Putin — to say that the U.S. is not responsible for Ukraine’s vile, treacherous strike on Russia’s nuclear potential,” Markov wrote in a Telegram post. “And he agreed with Putin that Zelensky is escalating the conflict.” It is not clear who initiated the phone call.

The Kremlin on Thursday went a step further, signaling it was expecting a strong condemnation from the White House following the airfield attack as well as a number of bridge bombings.

“We would have preferred to hear a strong condemnation, at the very least, of this terrorist act,” Peskov said.

Zelensky on Thursday said that after Russia has dropped thousands of bombs on Ukraine just this year, a military operation that lowered its rival’s striking capabilities was warranted, and he called for increased Western pressure on Moscow.

“Unfortunately, Putin feels impunity. Even after all of Russia’s horrific attacks, he is reportedly preparing yet more so-called ‘responses.’ … With every new strike, with every delay of diplomacy, Russia is giving the finger to the entire world — to all those who still hesitate to increase pressure on it,” he said in a post on social media.

The form and scale that Russia’s potential retaliation could take are unclear — there is no comparable fleet of bombers in Ukraine to target, and Putin still needs to balance the response against the risk of alienating Trump.

“If it will require the massive destruction of infrastructure, civilian infrastructure incurring many civilian losses, I wouldn’t say that it would help the talks and make President Trump happy,” said Alexander Baunov, senior associate at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “And this is the dilemma for Putin: It needs to be something effective and efficient but something that will not make him lose Trump forever.”

Baunov said Russia was careful to maintain Trump’s goodwill, while attempting to deflect blame onto Ukraine for the failure of the peace process.

“They need President Trump, and to not lose President Trump, so they have to at least pretend they are engaged in conversation with Ukraine,” he said. “And that’s basically the stage where we are now. They are pretending to be in direct conversations with Ukraine.”

Trump’s efforts to secure a swift peace deal, promised repeatedly during his election campaign, have reached an effective deadlock, with Putin successfully deflecting the U.S. demand for an immediate ceasefire while avoiding punitive new sanctions occasionally threatened by the president.

Trump last month had warned that he would take stronger action if he thought Putin was “tapping” him along with — or stringing out — the peace efforts. But Trump made no mention of this after Wednesday’s phone call, appearing to accept that Putin would retaliate over this week’s drone attacks.

After the call, Trump reposted a Washington Post column about a bipartisan bill that would allow him to impose harsh sanctions on Russia and potentially grant him the leverage to force Putin to end the war in Ukraine. But on Thursday, he said he hadn’t read the legislation yet, saying only, “at the right time, I’ll do what I want to do.”

In a sign of Putin’s success at rebuilding diplomatic ties without any compromises on Russia’s war on Ukraine, Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said Wednesday that the two presidents had agreed on their readiness “to remain in constant contact with each other.”

While many of Ukraine’s backers around the world have applauded Kyiv’s attack on the Russian bomber fleet, many of Trump’s associates have criticized the operation and Zelensky for raising global tensions and threatening to provoke a nuclear war — something Russian officials have threatened many times in the course of the conflict.

As someone who grew up during the Cold War, Trump — as well as his predecessor, former president Joe Biden — is particularly sensitive to the threat of a nuclear war, said Fiona Hill, who served as a Russia adviser during Trump’s first term, and this has made him reluctant to push back against Putin and his actions in Ukraine.

“That’s why we’re in such a mess in Ukraine,” she said. “It’s very clear to Putin that he’s got everybody where he wants them, that he can play at will with the nuclear saber-rattling, because, at the back of Trump’s and Biden’s minds, there are still all these searing images from the Cold War era.”