Trump Says Putin Let Him Down (Full Press Conference)

US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer hold a joint press conference in Buckinghamshire, UK. The press conference comes toward the end of President Trump's second state visit to the UK.

President Donald Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin had “really let me down,” but insisted allies must stop purchasing oil from Russia if they want the US to further intervene and pressure the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine.

“Very simply, if the price of oil comes down, Putin is going to drop out,” Trump said Thursday following a meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “He’s going to have no choice. He’s going to drop out of that war.”

While Trump said he’d be willing to consider other efforts to punish Putin, he signaled that those moves would be contingent on allies ending purchases of Russian energy.

“I’m willing to do other things, but not when the people that I’m fighting for are buying oil from Russia,” Trump said.

The European Union is looking at ways to more quickly phase out Russian liquefied natural gas imports. There are also plans for a potential meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York next week.

One US proposal that’s been advanced calls for secondary tariffs of as much as 100% on goods from China and India as well as other trade restrictions meant to curb the flow of Russian energy and prevent the transfer of dual-use technologies into Russia.

But aggressive steps including cutting off energy purchases are unlikely to be accepted by some nations that can block joint European Union actions, leaving talks at a deadlock and prompting questions about whether Trump, who has long enjoyed a friendly relationship with Putin, was committed to a pressure campaign.

Starmer also suggested that some European nations hadn’t done enough to wean themselves off Russian energy supplies.

“I think it is a challenge to Europe,” he said. “There are a number of European countries which are too reliant on energy from Russia.”

Trump later told reporters on Air Force One that Starmer’s UK was “not one of the culprits” in terms of oil purchases, adding that the UK leader had agreed that allies needed to “stop buying oil from Russia.”

The president said he told Starmer he’d “caught” European countries and NATO members “buying oil from Russia.”

“He said, ‘That’s not good,’” Trump said, adding: “I appreciated that he said that.”

Direct purchases of Russian oil by most European nations have stopped since Moscow’s invasion began in 2022, however a small volume continues to flow to landlocked countries in Eastern Europe including Hungary.

There’s a more complicated interplay with refined fuels such as diesel. Europe, which needs to import from elsewhere to meet its needs, buys large volumes of fuel from India and Turkey, nations that buy crude from Russia and then process it to sell abroad at a profit. Those purchases are permitted for now, though they are set to be banned from early next year. The exact details of how the ban would work remain uncertain.

Oil traders have been on edge for weeks because of the potential risk to Russian flows from US efforts to end the war as well as Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian energy facilities. So far, though, there hasn’t been an impact on supply large enough to push crude out of the $65 to $70 a barrel band it has been trading in since early August, and India is continuing to buy Russian oil.

Trump insisted he was committed to ending the conflict and repeatedly expressed his frustration with Putin, even as he maintained the conflict was unlikely to affect the US directly.

“He has let me down. I mean, he’s killing many people, and he’s losing more people than he’s, you know, than he’s killing.”

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