Trump blasts Putin as "absolutely crazy" as Russia targets Ukraine with massive wave of drones and missiles

CBS News

26-05-2025

Kyiv, Ukraine — Russia launched its biggest drone attack on Ukraine overnight since the more than three-year war began, a Ukrainian official said Monday. President Trump said Russian leader Vladimir Putin had gone "absolutely crazy" in stepping up his country's bombing of Ukraine just as the U.S. tries to broker a peace agreement.
Russia's Sunday night attack included the launch of 355 drones, Yuriy Ihnat, head of the Ukrainian air force's communications department, told The Associated Press. The previous night, Russia fired 298 drones and 69 missiles of various types in what Ukrainian authorities said was the largest combined aerial assault during the conflict. Overall, from Friday to Sunday, Russia launched around 900 drones at Ukraine, officials said.
The escalation appeared to thwart hopes that Mr. Trump's peace efforts might lead to a breakthrough in the near term, as Putin looks determined to capture more Ukrainian territory and inflict more damage.
Rescuers help local residents retrieve personal belongings from destroyed apartments, May 25, 2025, in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, after a Russian attack using exploding drones.
Serhii Ovcharyshyn/NikVesti.com/Global Images Ukraine/Getty
Russia has this month broken its record for aerial bombardments of Ukraine three times. The expansion of its air campaign came after Kyiv in March accepted an unconditional 30-day ceasefire proposed by the U.S., but Moscow effectively rejected it. Russia is also still pushing along the roughly 620-mile front line, where it has made slow and costly progress, and is assembling its forces for a summer offensive, Ukraine and military analysts say.
Mr. Trump made it clear he is losing patience with Putin.
"I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!" the U.S. president wrote Sunday night in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Putin is "needlessly killing a lot of people," Mr. Trump said, pointing out that "missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever."
He warned that if Putin wants to conquer all of Ukraine, it will "lead to the downfall of Russia!"
President Trump has expressed increasing frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid Russia's ongoing full-scale war in Ukraine.
But Mr. Trump again expressed frustration with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too, saying that he's, "doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does."
Zelenskyy reacted to the overnight Russian strikes in his own social media post on Monday, saying: "Only a sense of complete impunity can allow Russia to carry out such attacks and continually escalate their scale... There is no significant military logic to this, but there is considerable political meaning."
He repeated his call for tighter international economic sanctions on Russia as a way of ending the war, because Russia's "desire to fight must be deprived of resources."
Russia and Europe react to Trump's remarks on Putin
The Russian government appeared to downplay Mr. Trump's remarks about Putin as an emotional outburst, however some European leaders, who have been frustrated for months by the U.S. president repeating Kremlin talking points about the war and ridiculing Zelenskyy's government, seemed to take some hope by the change in tack.
At the Kremlin, Putin's chief spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that, "the start of the negotiation process [with Ukraine], for which the American side has done a lot, is a very important achievement. We are very thankful to the Americans and to President Trump personally for assistance in organizing and launching this negotiation process. This is a very important achievement … Of course, at the same time this is a very crucial moment, which is associated, of course, with the emotional overload of everyone, absolutely, and with emotional reactions. We follow this very closely."
French President Emmanuel Macron, however, told reporters during a visit to Vietnam that it seemed Mr. Trump appeared to be realizing that Putin had "lied" to him about wanting to find a diplomatic resolution to the war. The French leader said his hope was that Mr. Trump's anger at Moscow "translates into action," and he called for Ukraine's international partners to set a firm deadline for Moscow to agree to a ceasefire, with the threat of "massive sanctions" should Putin continue to refuse.
Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz, meanwhile, told his country's broadcaster WDR that "Putin obviously sees offers of talks as a sign of weakness," stressing the Kremlin's rejection of proposed direct talks with Ukraine at the Vatican as evidence that "we must be prepared for this war to last longer than we all wish or can imagine."
Merz said several of Ukraine's partners had already dropped restrictions on allowing their military aid to be used for strikes deep inside Russia.
"There are no longer any range restrictions on the weapons delivered to Ukraine. Not from the British, nor the French, nor from us… and not from the Americans either," Merz said Monday. "This means Ukraine can now also defend itself by attacking military targets in Russia. For a long time, it couldn't do that, and with a few exceptions, it didn't. We call this long-range fire, meaning equipping Ukraine in such a way that it can also strike military targets in the hinterland — and that is the decisive, qualitative difference in Ukraine's warfare: Russia is attacking civilian cities without any regard, bombing cities, hospitals, and nursing homes. Ukraine does not do that."
The European Union's top diplomat, foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, earlier described the latest attacks on Kyiv as "totally appalling" and said the bloc intended to impose more sanctions on Russia.
Mr. Trump has threatened massive sanctions on Moscow, too, but so far hasn't taken action.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin makes decisions that are necessary to ensure Russia's security and that the attacks were Moscow's response to deep strikes by Ukraine.
Prisoner swap provides a solitary sign of progress
Russia and Ukraine swapped hundreds more prisoners Sunday in the third and last part of a major exchange that was a rare moment of cooperation between the warring nations.
A screen capture from a video shows Russian soldiers after Russia and Ukraine on Sunday confirmed the third and final round of a large-scale prisoner swap carried out between Moscow and Kyiv under the terms of an agreement reached in Istanbul earlier this month, in Russia, May 25, 2025.
Russian Defense Ministry/Handout/Anadolu/Getty
Russia's Defense Ministry said each side exchanged 303 soldiers, following the release of 307 combatants and civilians each on Saturday, and 390 on Friday — the biggest total swap of the war.
In their talks held in Istanbul earlier this month, Kyiv and Moscow agreed to swap 1,000 prisoners of war and civilian detainees each. The exchange has been the only tangible outcome of those direct talks to date.