This winter, he tried to humiliate Ukraine's president, and now allows arms transfers to Kyiv. Behind the dramatic shift in Trump's thinking.

U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to ramp up arms shipments to Ukraine is a signal to Kyiv to abandon peace efforts, Russia said on Thursday, vowing it would not accept the "blackmail" of Washington's new sanctions ultimatum.

New developments Tuesday reinforced the idea that President Donald Trump has significantly shifted his view of the Ukraine war.

Russia took thousands of Ukrainian kids. Can peace talks bring them home? Vladimir Putin could not make out the names of the missing children that appeared on the screen in front of him. They were printed in tiny letters, 339 in all, each representing a child abducted from the war zone in Ukraine and, according to authorities in Kyiv, forcibly taken to Russia. Putin had never been confronted with the list in public, and he showed no particular interest in reading it. It was June 4, a warm day in Moscow, exactly three years, three months, and 11 days since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. In keeping with the habit of reclusiveness that he has cultivated during the war, the Russian President convened a meeting of his aides and ministers that day via video call. Their somber faces appeared in little boxes on his screen, while Putin sat at his desk alone. They had a lot on their agenda. Three days earlier, the war had spilled across the breadth of Russia as the Ukrainians smuggled a fleet of cheap drones across the border and used them to attack several military airfields, damaging or destroying Russian warplanes worth billions of dollars. The next day, Ukraine and Russia held another round of peace talks in Istanbul. Putin now wanted to know how they had gone, and he called on his lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, to give the highlights. About two minutes into his report, Medinsky reached for the list of children he had received from the Ukrainians in Istanbul. “These so-called kidnapped children,” he said. “They were saved by our soldiers, evacuated under fire.” Leafing through the list of names, he added, “We’ll have to figure out how many of them are here with us.” Putin gave no response, and the meeting moved on to other issues. Outside of Russia, the abduction of these children is widely seen as a war crime. For the Kremlin, it did not seem like an urgent matter. Indeed, over the past few months, the children’s fate has been pushed to the edges of the peace process, intensifying fears across Ukraine that they may never come home. The longer they remain in Russia, the more difficult it will be to return and reintegrate them, as the effect of Russian propaganda and indoctrination takes hold over time. In one case, an 11-year-old boy named Serhii refused to speak to his relatives in Ukraine after spending only a few months in Russian foster care. “They completely brainwashed him,” his older sister, Kseniia Koldin, told me after she managed to bring him home. “They convinced him that Ukraine had been destroyed, that he would starve if he went back.” Since the start of the war, about 1,200 of the abducted children have returned to Ukraine, thanks mostly to the dogged efforts of their relatives and humanitarian aid organizations. Ukraine’s envoys in Istanbul asked the Russians to return an additional 339 of them, hoping the Kremlin would see it as a simple way to build trust and show goodwill in the peace talks. But, in total, the authorities in Kyiv say 19,546 children still need to be returned. An independent research group at Yale University has spent the past three years tracking them through Russian news reports, public databases, and posts on social media, identifying more than 8,400 children who have been “systematically relocated” from Ukraine. The Trump Administration, as part of its broader suspension of foreign aid, cut off funding to the program in March; it has continued operating with help from private donors. Read More: Trump’s New Hard Line on Putin is Softer Than it Looks In a statement published shortly after the suspension of aid, the U.S. State Department said President Donald Trump would continue to work with Russia and Ukraine “to help make sure those children were returned home.” But some U.S. diplomats have urged Ukraine not to make the cease-fire talks with Russia conditional on the children’s return. “You can’t set conditions if you want to move forward,” one of them told me this spring. “And Trump wants to move fast.” Still, in his talks with Trump over the past few months, President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly brought up the missing children, as have lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A bipartisan group of Senators proposed a resolution in May calling for the return of all Ukrainian children before any peace deal with Russia is finalized. “We wanted to make sure that it was a part of the discussions,” says Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who co-sponsored the resolution. “Vladimir Putin should be in prison with the other notorious war criminals of history,” Wicker told me. “And it’s a shame that we are not coming down on him as forcefully as we should.” So far, the strongest pressure on Putin to return the children has come from the Hague. In March 2023, about a year into the Russian invasion, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Putin for the “unlawful transfer” of Ukrainian children to Russia. As an indicted war criminal, Putin faces the risk of arrest whenever he travels to one of the 125 countries that recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, including all of South America, nearly all of Europe, and roughly half of Africa. One of Putin’s longtime associates in Moscow told me the indictment continues to irk the Russian President: “Of course it’s not comfortable for him, to put it mildly, to have these restrictions, threats of arrest, and so on.” But he has gotten used to the isolation, and he feels no urgency to act on any of Ukraine’s demands. “He could spit on the Hague. He might give the children back as part of some humanitarian exchange. He’s not Stalin. But honestly it’s just not a high priority.” In Russian state media, the adoption and re-­education of Ukrainian children is often portrayed as an act of charity and patriotism. The Kremlin commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, bragged in a televised meeting with Putin in 2023 that she had herself adopted a teenage boy from Ukraine. “It’s thanks to you,” she told Putin. (The only other Russian official indicted by the ICC is Lvova-­Belova, who faces the same war-­crimes charges as Putin.) During their recent talks in Istanbul, Putin’s envoys at least acknowledged the issue of the missing children and promised to address it. “We will work on every one of the names in this list,” Medinsky, the lead Russian negotiator, said after the talks on June 2. But he could not resist taking a jab at the Ukrainians for demanding their children back. He compared the effort to a scene from Wag the Dog, in which a Hollywood producer helps the White House invent a war. The producer, played by Dustin Hoffman, at one point creates a fake video of a girl running through the ruins of the fabricated war. “If you want to get people crying, show them a lost child, ideally one holding a kitten,” Medinsky said. “So that’s what they’re showing us.” Of all the children on the list Putin saw, perhaps the best-­documented case is that of Margarita Prokopenko, who was only a few months old when the Russian invasion began. Abandoned at birth by her mother, Margarita was the youngest of several dozen children living in a home for orphans and kids with disabilities in the city of Kherson. In early March 2022, Russian troops overran that city and installed a puppet government to run it. Many of those who showed open resistance to the occupation were arrested or killed. A member of the Russian parliament, Igor Kastyukevich, soon arrived from Moscow to help cement the Kremlin’s control, and he began making frequent visits to the orphanage that spring. Kastyukevich, who represents Putin’s political party, would often arrive in the company of armed men, dressed in camouflage, and bring food and other supplies for the children, according to videos he posted online to document the visits. Early that fall, Kastyukevich and other Russian officials began taking the children away, they said, to ensure their safety. Margarita, the youngest, was among the first. According to Ukrainian investigators, the girl ended up in the custody of a prominent Putin ally named Sergei Mironov, who has been a fixture of Russia’s ruling elite for over a quarter century. When we first met in Moscow in 2010, Mironov served as chairman of the upper house of parliament, representing Fair Russia, one of the sham opposition parties that the Kremlin uses to create the illusion of competitive politics. With the start of the invasion in 2022, Mironov dropped that charade and became one of the shrillest cheerleaders for Putin and the war. His tirades against Ukraine stood out for their bloodthirsty rhetoric. “Let us destroy all of the infrastructure of Nazi Ukraine once and for all,” he wrote on his website in October 2022. Around that time, Putin took formal steps to annex Kherson and three other frontline regions of Ukraine. Kastyukevich, who oversaw the removal of the children from the orphanage, then became Kherson’s representative in the Russian parliament. It remains unclear exactly how Margarita ended up in the care of Mironov in Moscow. But a BBC investigation found in 2023 that the politician’s wife Inna Varlamova made multiple trips to Kherson to see the girl before her abduction, including at the hospital where Margarita received treatment for bronchitis during the Russian occupation of the city. The BBC obtained documents showing that upon her arrival in Russia, the girl was issued a new birth certificate, which listed her name as Marina Mironova, after her adoptive father in Moscow. Mironov has not denied taking the girl into his home. In a post on social media, he responded to the BBC report with characteristic vitriol, calling it “another fake hysteria” created by Ukraine’s intelligence agencies and their “curators” in the West. “They have one goal in all this,” he wrote. “To crudely and personally discredit everyone who takes an uncompromisingly patriotic position.” Reached by TIME through his spokeswoman in Moscow, Mironov declined to comment further. He did not respond to specific questions about Margarita. The Russian occupation of Kherson did not last long. In early November 2022, about two months after the children were taken from the city’s orphanage, Ukrainian forces drove the Russians out. Zelensky soon went to raise the flag in front of city hall, and he invited me to join him for the ceremony. Kherson and its suburbs had been devastated in the fighting, much of the infrastructure damaged or destroyed. “They cut off all the power, all lines of communication,” the President told me during the trip. “We need to restore all that as soon as possible.” The mood among the people of Kherson worried Zelensky just as much. They had been subjected to nine months of relentless Russian propaganda, which depicts the government in Kyiv as a band of fascist thugs. Curriculums in schools had been changed to convey the same message, and Zelensky feared it had taken hold. “I’m shocked by the force of this information, the sickness of it.” He worried that the older children could be recruited into the Russian military or, as he put it, “dragged into the war against us.” On the train back to Kyiv, the President and his team worked on a set of 10 demands for ending the war. They called it the Peace Formula, and its fourth point called for the return of all Ukrainian children. “We know by name 11,000 children who were forcibly deported to Russia,” he said in a speech on Nov. 15, 2022, the day after our trip to Kherson. “Among them are many whose parents were killed by Russian strikes, and now they are being held in the state that murdered them.” In total, around 1.6 million Ukrainian children are now living in parts of Ukraine that Russia has occupied. They are exposed to Kremlin propaganda in schools, on state-run media, and programs devoted to “patriotic education.” According to the Yale research program, which is run out of its School of Public Health, the kids selected for transfer to Russia tend to be among the most vulnerable, like orphans living in group homes. The researchers found that many of the children were taken from frontline regions of Ukraine and placed in temporary shelters before being assigned to Russian foster families; military transport planes were sometimes used to take the children to Russia. For Ukraine, the permanent loss of these children would deepen a looming demographic crisis. Since the start of the Russian invasion, the population of Ukraine has collapsed from around 41 million people to 32 million, according to official statistics. A U.N. report published last year projected that, by the end of this century, Ukraine would only have 15 million residents. The main drivers of this decline will be knock-on effects from the war, which has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of men and led millions of women and children to flee as refugees. All of that adds to the sense of urgency Ukrainians feel in bringing their children home. Last year, Zelensky assigned this mission to one of his close aides, Daria Zarivna, who was born and grew up in Kherson, not far from the emptied orphanage. When we met in March, she said she was especially troubled by the case of Margarita. The statements of the girl’s adoptive father in Moscow made it clear she would be raised in an atmosphere of hatred toward her homeland. “If we don’t get these kids back soon,” Zarivna told me, “the Russian system will succeed in turning them against us.” In December, Zarivna got a chance to tell Margarita’s story at the U.N. Arriving in New York City, she carried a folder of documents related to her case, including copies of Margarita’s original birth certificate and the new one issued in Russia. As Zarivna went over a draft of her speech, she got word that Russia was trying to block her appearance. “They used every possible lever,” she says. Russia’s delegates said Zarivna did not have the accreditation needed to address the chamber. The U.S. insisted on giving her the floor, and footage of her speech went viral in Ukraine that day. But it was the Russian reaction that resonated most. “Kherson Children’s Home, just one case of many,” Zarivna said before turning to the Russians in the room. “You know where our children exactly are,” she told them. The representative of Moscow, a young diplomat named Roman Kashaev, looked up from his desk, cracked a smile, and began to laugh. A few months later, Zelensky arrived in Washington for a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. Their agenda was packed. The White House wanted Zelensky to hand over the rights to Ukraine’s natural resources, particularly its rare earth minerals. The deal was meant to give Trump an economic rationale for continuing to support Ukraine. Zelensky, for his part, wanted to talk about Trump’s efforts to negotiate with Putin, and the conditions Ukraine wanted to set for the peace process. At the start of their meeting on Feb. 28, Zelensky brought up the missing children. He explained to Trump how the Russians changed their names and placed them with Russian families. “We want to bring them back,” Zelensky said. “It’s a big dream, task and goal for me.” A few minutes later, as Trump began taking questions from reporters, the meeting grew tense, then angry. The two leaders ended up yelling at each other, arguing over the leverage Ukraine has in the peace talks. “You don’t have the cards,” Trump said. “With us you start having cards.” After the argument, Zelensky was asked to leave the White House, and the U.S. froze all aid to Ukraine, including weapons and intelligence. The flow of assistance resumed only after March 11, when envoys from the U.S. and Ukraine held talks in Saudi Arabia. “The Ukrainians made very clear that this isn’t just about ending a war,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led the U.S. delegation, told reporters after those talks. “They need to get their prisoners of war back; they need to get the children back.” Nonetheless, Ukraine consented to the U.S. plan for a cease-fire with no preconditions. The following week, news broke that the U.S. government had stopped funding the Yale program that tracks children abducted into Russia. Ukraine’s allies in Washington were outraged. “This data is absolutely crucial to Ukraine’s efforts to return their children home,” a bipartisan group of U.S. Congressmen wrote in a letter to Rubio. Speaking later to the press, Rubio promised the U.S. would secure all the data Yale researchers had collected on the missing children and make it accessible to other parties. But the program “is not funded,” Rubio said. “It was part of the reductions that were made.” A few days later, I asked Zelensky how he felt about this move, and his face showed a mix of sadness and frustration. Weighing his words, he told me it was “regrettable” for the Trump Administration not to stand more firmly with Ukraine on the matter of the missing children. “I think they want to show that they are in the middle,” he told me. “That means they can get behind Ukraine’s suggestions, or they can get behind those of Russia. They are demonstrating that.” Still, at every round of peace talks, Zelensky insisted that Ukraine would continue to demand the return of its children. Even after his argument with Trump in the Oval Office, he continues to raise the matter in their phone calls. “We have talked about the children, how to get them back,” Zelensky told me in his office in Kyiv. “There are really big obstacles. There are children who lost their parents, but they have a grandmother waiting for them here.” He refuses to think of them as prisoners of war, even if that status might make the children eligible for some kind of swap with the Russians. “It cannot be a trade,” Zelensky says, “because we don’t live in some other century. It’s not like buying them out of slavery.” In his view, the only way to win the kids back would be through an international campaign to force Putin’s hand, whether through sanctions against Russia, military support for Ukraine, or criminal charges like the ones Putin faces in the Hague. “The question comes down to the will of certain leaders, who can simply put pressure on Putin to return the children,” Zelensky says. “Trump is one of them. There’s no other way.”