Trump Says He May Give Tomahawks to Ukraine. Is He Bluffing?

Fresh off negotiating a peace deal intended to end the war in Gaza, President Trump on Tuesday suggested that he may allow a sale of U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, giving Kyiv the ability to conduct long-range strikes deep into Russia.

That is exactly the kind of message that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wants to hear as he prepares for a visit to the White House on Friday. “He would like to have Tomahawks,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Zelensky. “We have a lot of Tomahawks.”

But it is also something that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has warned against, saying that such a sale would signal a “qualitatively new stage of escalation.”

Mr. Trump’s threats to provide the missiles to Ukraine — whether he follows through on them or not — are a sign of his growing frustration with Mr. Putin, who has refused to budge or compromise despite Mr. Trump’s splashy attempts at diplomacy.

The Defense Department has drawn up plans to sell or transfer Tomahawks should Mr. Trump give the order. But providing the weapons would come with enormous challenges, not least the fact that Ukraine does not have the naval or ground-based launchers required to fire the missiles.

Ukraine would need a U.S. Army launcher called Typhon to fire the Tomahawks, a step that military officials say would pull the United States closer to direct confrontation with Russia. It is unclear how many Tomahawks the United States could provide, how Ukraine would safely store them and what impact a limited number of the missiles would have.