Four weeks ago, Donald Trump used his social media platform to announce a development that seemed encouraging.

“Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy targets,” the American president wrote. “Russia has agreed to do, likewise!”

If accurate, this was the kind of news that might have had at least some positive effect on the global energy market and, just as importantly, might have signaled some diplomatic progress between Russia and Ukraine.

It was not, however, accurate. Just three days after the Republican published his missive, Bloomberg News reported that both countries had traded strikes on energy infrastructure. Around the same time, The New York Times reported the Russian and Ukrainian governments made clear “that neither had agreed to an energy cease-fire that President Trump presented as a done deal a day before.”

Though this hardly seemed possible, less than a month later, the same thing has happened.

On Sunday morning, Trump again turned to his social media platform to announce the same breakthrough that he got wrong four weeks earlier.

“Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine,” he wrote. “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Soon after, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he supported the underlying idea, though he didn’t know what agreement Trump was referring to. The Associated Press further reported:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday that Russia has continued to strike Ukraine’s energy facilities even after U.S. President Donald Trump said a day earlier that the warring countries had agreed on an energy ceasefire in the 4 1/2-year-old war. […]

Zelenskyy said Ukraine had been “horribly surprised” when, following Trump’s announcement, Russia struck numerous energy facilities including a power plant in the northeastern city of Kharkiv as well as a gas production facility and a civilian gas station.

Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum in Poland, he added, “It was clear that (Russian’s Vladimir) Putin does not read Truth Social.”

As the alleged “energy ceasefire” collapsed immediately, Axios reported that Trump “appears to be singlehandedly trying to will a partial ceasefire into existence.”

That might very well be true, although as grown-ups tend to understand, complex diplomatic breakthroughs don’t happen through aggressive wishing and social media posting.

Stepping back, there’s a broader problem of ongoing importance. I can appreciate why much of the political world has grown inured to circumstances like these, but consider: During the region’s biggest and most destabilizing war since World War II, which Trump promised to end on the first day of his second term, he has publicly boasted to the world about a major breakthrough that did not exist — twice.

In the not-too-distant past, such a development would’ve been the basis for a major controversy, and the White House would be under pressure to explain how and why the president managed to get something like this so terribly wrong — again.

But because we’ve reached a point where much of the world simply expects Trump to say things that aren’t true, as he appears to struggle to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, missteps that should be costly and humiliating tend to get lost in the shuffle.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Yet again, Trump’s boasts of a Russian-Ukrainian ‘energy ceasefire’ fall apart appeared first on MS NOW.

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