German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had one main ask of President Trump during his Oval Office visit on Thursday: that the American president stand with Europe in pressuring Moscow to back down from attacks on Ukraine and push to end the three-year war.
To which Mr. Trump replied: Maybe they need to fight a little longer.
“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office as Mr. Merz looked on, stone faced. “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 and then pulling them apart.”
It was the latest pivot by Mr. Trump away from the bloody conflict that he once said confidently that he would end.
On Thursday, however, he compared the Russia-Ukraine war to a hockey game, where referees sometimes allow players to drop gloves and brawl on the ice — an observation he said he had also made earlier in the week in a private phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “I gave that analogy to Putin yesterday,” he added. “I said, ‘President, maybe you’re going to have to keep fighting and suffering a lot, because both sides are suffering, before you pull them apart, before they’re able to be pulled apart.’”
Mr. Trump’s posture comes as a substantial setback for Mr. Merz and his fellow European leaders, at a moment that German officials say could be decisive for Ukraine’s chances of forging peace on favorable terms.
Mr. Merz had come to Washington hoping to persuade Mr. Trump to play a more active role in defending Ukraine, bringing unrivaled U.S. power to the task of forcing Russia to end its invasion of its smaller neighbor.
The German leader told reporters in the Oval Office that both he and Mr. Trump favored stopping the war soon. “And I told the president before we came in,” he said, “that he is the key person in the world who can really do that now by putting pressure on Russia.”
But Mr. Trump made no promises of such pressure. The closest he came was in response to a question about if and when he might favor new financial penalties on Russia, as European leaders, including Mr. Merz, have proposed. Mr. Trump said he had a deadline “in my brain” for when he might favor such a move.
He also suggested that Ukraine, the victim of Russian aggression, might come in for financial punishment. “We’ll be very, very, very tough, and it could be on both countries, to be honest,” Mr. Trump said. “You know, it takes two to tango.”
Aides say that Mr. Trump is exasperated with both presidents in the conflict, but often more so with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Trump has told his advisers that Mr. Zelensky is a “bad guy” who is edging the world to the precipice of nuclear war. But Mr. Trump has also told aides that it is understandable that Mr. Zelensky is fighting back, given he is in a war against an enemy that seems determined to keep bombing Ukrainian cities.
With Mr. Putin, the president seems more disappointed than angry. He had seemed to genuinely believe that his personal relationship with the Russian leader would bring a swift end to the war, advisers say. But Mr. Trump has learned the limits of American leverage with Russia when he is reluctant to send Ukraine more money or weapons.
Superficially, at least, the Oval Office appearance went better for Mr. Merz than he and his advisers privately had expected. There were none of the blow-ups that have characterized some of Mr. Trump’s other meetings with foreign leaders. The two men had a warm rapport and exchanged compliments, with Mr. Trump asking jokingly at one point if the chancellor spoke German as well as he spoke English.
Mr. Merz spoke relatively little, but he was repeatedly praised by the president.
The chancellor is a “very good man to deal with,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s difficult, I would say. Can I say that? It’s a positive.”
Mr. Merz had rehearsed for the trip, and his aides sought advice from other foreign officials who have recently visited the White House. They were determined to avoid the sort of public dressing-down that Mr. Trump had given Mr. Zelensky and President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in recent months.
Mr. Merz spoke critically of Mr. Trump soon after he returned to the White House, and he has drawn criticism from Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio over Germany’s restrictions on political speech, including by the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
On Thursday, Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio sat silently on a couch through the 45-minute televised news conference.
German and American officials said before the meeting that the war in Ukraine would top the leaders’ agenda, along with discussions of European military spending and efforts to help resolve trade tensions between the United States and the European Union.
And while Mr. Trump occasionally veered into domestic topics during the news conference — including the vetting of international students at Harvard University and elsewhere, tensions with his former adviser Elon Musk over a sprawling domestic policy bill and conspiracy theories about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s use of an autopen to sign legislation — reporters and Mr. Merz nudged him back to discussing a war that has turned out to be far more difficult to end than Mr. Trump had predicted.
Mr. Trump promised during the presidential campaign that he could make peace between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours, but he now says he was being sarcastic when he offered that time frame. More than four months into his second term, he increasingly talks about the war as if he were a bystander, powerless to affect the outcome.
The president is caught between wanting a legacy as a peacemaker and wanting to avoid ownership of what he increasingly views as a hopeless war, advisers say. He routinely distances himself from the conflict, calling it “Biden’s war,” and claims that Mr. Putin would have never ordered the invasion if Mr. Trump had been president in 2022.
“That’s typical Trump,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser and now a critic of his leadership. “He’s always a winner, he’s never a loser and he believes that if you don’t talk about something, it will go away.”
“His instinctive reaction to bad news is to say, ‘play it down, play it down,’” he added.
After calling Mr. Putin “absolutely crazy” last month, Mr. Trump shifted his tone and said he wanted to give the Russian leader two weeks to show signs of progress. He then dropped the timeline altogether in a statement on social media on Wednesday, instead simply relaying Mr. Putin’s intent to attack Ukraine in retaliation for its stunning drone attack over the weekend against nuclear-capable bombers inside Russia.
He continued in that vein on Thursday, despite Mr. Merz’s repeated efforts to extract a more solid commitment. At one point, in what appeared to be a rehearsed line, Mr. Merz reminded the president that the anniversary of the D-Day operation was coming on Friday: June 6, “when the Americans once ended a war in Europe.”
The line did not have its intended effect.
Mr. Trump interjected a joke about the Nazis. “That was not a pleasant day for you,” he said, referring to America’s defeat of Adolf Hitler.
Mr. Merz countered, in a serious tone, that “in the long run, Mr. President, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.”
“We know what we owe you,” the chancellor added, “but this is the reason why I’m saying that America is, again, in a very strong position to do something on this war and ending this war.”
Mr. Trump made no commitments. Instead, he boasted about the U.S. economy and military recruitment numbers under his leadership. And then he compared the war to children fighting, or a hockey game.
Aides say that Mr. Trump is still considering piling more pressure on Mr. Putin, including financial measures, but that he is not sure that it would make a difference, given that the Russian president has engineered his economy to withstand punishing sanctions.
Mr. Trump has yet to endorse bipartisan legislation advanced by his ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, which would impose severe economic penalties against Russia. He told reporters on Thursday he had not read the bill, but that senators would ultimately follow his lead in deciding how to act against Russia.
Aides say Mr. Merz is under no illusions about his potential influence on Mr. Trump when it comes to the war. They sought to lower expectations ahead of the trip, saying that Mr. Merz was simply hoping to keep Mr. Trump engaged with his European allies in backing Ukraine.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday that he had urged Mr. Putin to stop the war in a phone call this week, but that Mr. Putin told him he had no choice but to attack based on Ukraine’s strikes over the weekend.
And, Mr. Trump added, “it’s probably not going to be pretty.”
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed from Berlin.
Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941
Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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