Does Trump understand what's going on in the Ukraine war?

Trump’s Truth Social post, particularly the parts bolded below, suggests otherwise:

I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He's gone completely MAD! He's killing so many people unnecessarily, and I'm not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being fired at cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever. I've always said he wants all of Ukraine, not just a part of it, and perhaps that will turn out to be true, but if he does, it will lead to Russia's downfall! President Zelenskyy isn't doing his country any favors with his statements either. Everything he says causes problems. I don't approve of that, and I hope he stops doing it. This war would never have started if I were president. This is the war of Zelenskyy, Putin, and Biden, not "Trump's." I'm only helping to put out the big, ugly fires that have been started by gross incompetence and hatred.

The Russian missile attacks are not “without reason”

The Russian missile and drone attacks were not “without any reason,” but were in retaliation for a series of drone attacks by the Ukrainians:

What's actually happening is that Russia has stepped up its bombing of Ukraine in response to Ukraine first stepping up its drone attacks , with Putin's helicopter nearly being shot down after being caught in a swarm of drones during a visit to Kursk.

And they don't kill "unnecessarily many people"

The fact that Russia can launch almost 400 munitions at Ukraine (with the vast majority hitting) and kill only a dozen people should probably be a clue that they are, in fact, not trying to terrorize and indiscriminately kill civilians.

On his program, Ron Paul made a similar point, contrasting the low number of Ukrainian casualties from Russian rocket attacks with the high number of casualties in Gaza from Israeli attacks.

DONALD TRUMP - Driven by emotions, not thought or reason

Of course, Gaza's much higher population density partly explains the higher number of civilian casualties, but there's also a difference in how Russia and Israel view their respective enemies.

The Israelis want nothing more to do with the Gazans after this war and hope they'll be relocated. The Russians, on the other hand, realize that the Ukrainians will always remain their neighbors and that they are closely related peoples. So there seems to be a certain reluctance on the Russian side that's lacking on the Israeli side.

The war now is Trump's war

This point was made by the podcasters at Russians with Attitude:

The moment Trump stepped back into the Oval Office, history was handed to him on a silver platter. He had the perfect opportunity to neatly and confidently exit the Ukrainian quagmire . One prime-time speech would have sufficed: release the classified casualty reports, point to the charred Bradley cars, and declare that the criminal Biden cabal had plunged America into a failed proxy war. Add to that the two very real attempts on his life linked to Kyiv, and it would have been over.

Instead, the wheels keep turning. The planes are still landing in Poland, the American base in Wiesbaden is still conducting the war . There are two possible explanations for this: first, he never intended to withdraw America from the conflict, and the anti-war rhetoric was merely a sham, intended for rallies in the Rust Belt and for some of his allies who may have been sincere. Second, he himself and the people he has tasked with this process are hopelessly incompetent.

Regardless, the result on the ground is the same: America kills Russians every day, and every HIMARS missile, every Starlink-guided drone, every artillery shell, every rocket now belongs to Trump.

It's Trump's war now, and he can repeat his rhetoric as often as he likes, but that won't change anything – Trump has deliberately kept the war going, and he has deliberately tied the fate of American security and credibility to the criminal regime in Kyiv.

Russian diplomacy remains courteous; someone has to be mature here, but the Kremlin is well aware of this. Putin wasn't lying when he said that ultimately, Russia doesn't care much who wins the US presidential election. Trump had the opportunity to prove otherwise, and he didn't, for whatever reason. History will remember that.

A further point is that the longer Trump waits to pull the plug on Ukraine, the more embarrassing the end will be for him. The sooner he pulls the plug, the more this will be seen as a European proxy war against Russia rather than an American one. And then it will be the Europeans who foot the bill, not us.

If America withdraws from the war, Trump can continue to build profitable trade relations with Russia: hire them to build nuclear icebreakers for us, import their oil, send our oil companies to drill in their Arctic fields, and so on.