Here’s the question. Has Vladimir Putin been playing Donald Trump, stringing him along, and making a fool out of him. You be the judge.
On June 14th, President Trump had a phone call with Russia’s President Putin. When it was over, Trump was optimistic about achieving peace.
To show Russia’s willingness to negotiate, President Trump pointed out that Putin was “doing the planned prisoner swaps” that Russia negotiated with Ukraine in Turkey on June 2nd. Said Trump, “large numbers of prisoners are being exchanged, immediately, from both sides.”
But within three days, Vladimir Putin gave his real answer to Donald Trump’s optimism. He began a series of some of the biggest drone and missile attacks in human history. On June 17th, Russia attacked Ukraine with over 472 drones and missiles, an attack that killed 28 people in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. On June 23, Russia attacked Ukraine with 368 missiles and drones. On June 24th, 340. On June 27th, 371. And on Wednesday July 9th, an overwhelming 741.
What’s more Russia has a stockpile of eight thousand more drones and missiles just waiting to attack Ukrainian targets. And every single day Russia is able to manufacture more of these aerial weapons than it uses.
How has Vladimir Putin pulled this off? While he was jollying President Trump into a false belief in peace, he was radically retooling his economy, gearing it for permanent war.
He built seventeen missile and drone factories. Including a factory to manufacture upgraded Iranian Shahid drones. Putin employed a million workers in his drone, missile, and other military plants. And he made those factories smarter, more automated, cheaper, and faster than any other military machine on the face of this earth.
Putin put seven percent of his economy into that war machine. The result? An American drone like the Phoenix Ghost costs $50,000 and takes two days to make. A Russian drone like Russia’s upgraded Shahid costs ten thousand dollars less and takes only three hours to manufacture.
What’s more Russia has something we do not. It has hypersonic missiles. Missiles that can travel over five times the speed of sound.
We, too, have a hypersonic missile, the Dark Eagle. But our military has not put into mass production.
What’s worse, each Dark Eagle, will take three to four weeks to make and will cost forty one million dollars. The Russia equivalent, the Zircon, is far faster to build and is staggeringly less expensive.
So far, American Patriot missiles have been “surprisingly” successful in stopping Russia’s hypersonic missiles. But that success may soon come to a halt. Russia has a new hypersonic missile that just went into production on June 23rd, the Oreshnik. That missile is able to zig and zag through the air at Mach 10. And it releases six warheads that are also hypersonic zig-zaggers.
No defensive weapons we’ve been able to build will reliably stop them.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has not been taking this lying down. Ukraine used to be a prime location for the development of weapons and military airplanes in the days of the Soviet Union. That heritage is blossoming again today.
Less than a year ago, we were bemoaning the fact that Russia could shoot 50,000 artillery shells at Ukrainian troops in a day, but that we could only manufacture 1,300 shells. Today, Ukraine is manufacturing almost all the artillery shells it needs.
Ukraine has over 500 plants for weapons production. It supports over a thousand tech startups offering new military tricks. And it is producing some of the most advanced drone motherships, drone swarms, and autonomous armored carriers that the battlefields of this earth have ever seen.
To shelter its weapons makers from Russian bombardment, Ukraine is building armaments factories in Denmark, Poland, and Germany. In fact, it has an international program called “Build With Ukraine.” Under that program, Ukraine is showing its European partners how to make weapons of the future, not just weapons of the past.
You can see this Ukrainian ingenuity in the attacks Ukraine has made on Russia’s air bases and the planes they house. Not to mention in the Ukrainian naval drone attacks that have driven Russia to retreat from the Black Sea, the remote attacks on Putin’s pride, his twelve-mile-long Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. And Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russian fuel depots and Russia’s weapons factories.
Has Putin been stringing President Donald Trump along? You bet. And that deception has bought Putin enough time to create a military economy designed not just to run over Ukraine, but to take as much of Europe as Putin pleases.
References:
https://tass.com/politics/1987347
https://tass.com/defense/1986971
https://tass.com/politics/1987401
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/07/7/7520550
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/europe/russia-drone-attack-ukraine-trump-putin-intl-hnk
https://www.understandingwar.org
https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/
https://www.understandingwar.org
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https://www.mirasafety.com/blogs/news/hypersonic-missile-update
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ai-drones-robot-gunners-ukraine-war-2l3hdzf9m
https://www.ft.com/content/a3845802-1fab-4719-9981-2f463414417f
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/19/ukraine-bohdana-howitzer-european-military-funding
https://ukraineworld.org/en/articles/analysis/ukraines-new-power-weapons-and-innovation
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/11/ukraines-battlefield-drone-innovations
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-defense-industry-can-make-more-weapons-extra-capacity-2025-6
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russia-launches-largest-drone-attack-ukraine-kyiv-pushes/story
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-airstrike-ukraine-war-largest/
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute