Vladimir Putin personally thanked Donald Trump on Friday for staging a humiliating ambush of Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office last year.
The Russian president’s remarks came in response to his own personal humiliation after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sent him an open letter offering to resume peace talks—with a taunting reminder that at 73, “age is beginning to take its toll” for the Botoxed leader.
Referring to Zelensky only as “the author,” Putin fumed at his adversary’s suggestion that Trump was not going to get the Kremlin what they want in Ukraine, despite whatever promises the American leader made previously.
“We all saw how Donald–before the eyes of the entire world–taught the author of this letter by pointing out the dress code,” Putin said, referring to the infamous ambush at the White House where Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelensky in front of a swarm of TV cameras, set off by a reporter asking why the Ukrainian leader wasn’t wearing a suit.
The Russian president’s overture to Trump came during a televised speech at an annual economic forum in St. Petersburg, where Ukrainian forces pulled off long-range drone strikes shortly before Putin’s arrival.
Perhaps capitalizing on the optics of those strikes, Zelensky on Thursday published an open letter to Putin inviting him to sit down for direct talks.
The letter seemed designed to call Trump’s attention to Putin’s declining power, dwindling approval ratings, and economic setbacks after years of war, with an implicit suggestion that the Russian leader Trump has so admired over the years might no longer, as Trump himself put it last year, “have the cards.”
Putin brought up the scandalous Oval Office meeting where Trump made those remarks in February 2025, apparently trying to convince the American president that it was Moscow and Washington that were allied against Kyiv, not the other way around.
Putin also seemed to urge Trump to return to his public shaming of the Ukrainian leader, invoking a 1982 film that the American president is known to be a fan of.
“You see, constantly giving off ‘Rambo. First Blood’ might be appropriate in some contexts, of course, but not everywhere. That’s the first point. As for manners, overall, I want to thank Donald for this effort. It is undoubtedly helpful, but there is still work to be done, and we need to keep at it,” Putin said.
Shortly before his tirade, Putin engaged in a clearly scripted moment with Trump’s ballroom commissioner, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., whose attendance at the forum was touted by Kremlin-controlled media as proof of Washington showing respect by sending an official “delegation,” even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed oblivious to any such moves.
If the Kremlin was counting on Trump’s chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts to help Moscow put Zelensky in his place, however, they may have been disappointed to learn that all he really wanted to do was show off Trump’s designs for his ballroom and monuments to himself.
After pulling out mock-ups of Trump’s ballroom and the “Arc de Trump” during a panel discussion earlier this week, Cook, who was asked to say a few words at the event’s closing session on Friday, stood up to tell Putin: “I do give a good hello from your friend President Trump.”
“We have a lot of ideas to talk about between our two capital cities in the next week,” he added.
