Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said that US President Donald Trump has declared war on the Kremlin on Thursday.
"The US is our adversary, and its verbose ‘peacemaker’ is now firmly on the warpath against Russia," Medvedev wrote on his personal Telegram.
"Some will obviously say he had no other option now because of the pressure from Congress, etc., but that still doesn’t change the most important thing: these decisions are an act of war against Russia. And now Trump is completely aligned with mad Europe. "
Medvedev said that the move of the "Trumpian pendulum" simply meant that Russia could now hammer Ukraine with a wide variety of weapons "without regard to unnecessary negotiations."
At the time of publication, the Kremlin had not responded in an official capacity to Medvedev's comments.
Trump cancels summit with Putin in Budapest
This comes after Trump cancelled a planned summit in Hungary with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A senior White House official told Reuters, "there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future" after Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a "productive call" but opted against an in-person meeting.
In comments to the press this week, Trump stated that his conversations with Putin “don’t go anywhere.”
“We canceled the meeting with President Putin. It just, it didn’t feel right to meet. It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I canceled it, but we’ll do it in the future,” Trump said.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time til I’ll see what happens,” he added.
Russia reiterated its long-standing terms for a peace deal in a private communique known as a "non-paper" that it sent to the US last weekend, according to two US officials and two people familiar with the situation.
On Wednesday, Trump placed sanctions on Russian oil companies Lukoil and Rosneft.
The sanctions are a major policy shift for Trump, who had not put sanctions on Russia over the war and instead relied on trade measures. Trump imposed additional 25% tariffs on goods from India in retaliation for it purchasing discounted Russian oil.
When asked why he waited until this point in his presidency to place sanctions on Moscow, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly pushed for, Trump said that he “just felt it was time.”
Reuters contributed to this report.