End of the bromance Has Trump finally lost patience with Putin?

"I'm not happy with Putin. I can tell you that much right now," Trump said, expressing his frustration with the Russian leader over the war in Ukraine.

- Patrick Wintour

"We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin... He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless."

It may not have been Churchillian in oratorical flourish, and with Trump everything is capable of being reversed in hours, but possibly, just possibly, the rupture between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump has happened.

If so it is a transformatory moment, and a vindication for both Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he arrives in Rome for the annual Ukraine reconstruction conference and for those others, notably the British and the French governments, who have patiently helped the scales to fall from Trump's eyes about Putin's true intentions. At long last, the US president seems to have accepted that the Russian leader is unpersuadable on ending the war.

With Trump the separation is unlikely to be complete, or permanent, and above all Trump's disappointment in Putin may not translate into the practical support Ukraine and Europe has been seeking, but America First is no longer Russia First.

It has been a long process with many low points. In February it seemed as if the whole transatlantic alliance was on the brink of collapse, as Trump initiated direct talks with Putin, and ordered Ukraine to make concessions. On 19 February he echoed Kremlin talking point in a post to his Truth Social network that called Zelenskyy a “dictator” and warned him time was running out for Ukraine: “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the US into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn't be won [...] A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

A week later at the UN general assembly in New York, the US opposed a European-drafted resolution condemning Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and supporting Ukraine's territorial integrity - voting the same way as Russia, North Korea and Belarus.