Trump's Iran attack rattles Russian hardliners calling for Putin to double down on war in Ukraine

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, some Russian hardliners were cautiously optimistic, hoping his unpredictability and transactional nature might benefit Moscow on Ukraine.

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But his attack on Iran means many now see him as a growing threat to Russia itself and are questioning if Trump is the pragmatic, potentially pro-Moscow strongman ready to deal in realpolitik that they thought he was.

Some hawks are publicly demanding that Moscow abandon US-brokered peace talks with Ukraine and double down on fighting there instead, arguing that the US-Iran nuclear talks, which preceded the US-Israeli air war, were a cynical ploy that showed Washington cannot be trusted.

"The unprincipled United States is a threat to the entire world," said nationalist tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev, who is married to a top Kremlin official. "This is the United States we are trying to negotiate with regarding Ukraine. Yes, it wants a weak Europe. But it also wants a weak Russia."

Boris Rozhin, an influential war blogger who goes by the moniker "Colonel Cassad" and has nearly 800,000 followers on the Telegram app, said Trump was a monster, driven mad by impunity.

"To seriously count on any agreements or deals with it (the monster) is either foolishness or treason," opined Rozhin.

Andrei Sidorov, a prominent academic, went further, telling state TV that Trump was "a dangerous man" and that he regretted that the US president had survived an assassination attempt in July 2024 before he was reelected later that year.