Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Deadline for Putin Was a Joke (w. Caolan Robertson)

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Tim Miller is joined by Caolan Robertson to give us an update from Ukraine. Putin just blew past Trump’s “50-day deadline” and nothing changed. While Russia escalates strikes on EU and NATO-linked targets, Ukrainian kids are starting the school year in bunkers under drone fire. In Moscow, classrooms hand out rifles instead of flowers. On the frontlines, Ukraine is fighting back by targeting Russian oil refineries starving Putin’s war machine of cash. Caolan Roberston YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCTQs-6DP7Vu0uWwFa9KHYCA 

Hey, everybody, Tim Moore from the Bullwark. We were back with our T-Facto Ukraine correspondent, Kailen Robertson is coming at us from. Where are you right now? I'm in the capital. Yeah, I'm in Cave now. And he's just back from the front lines. And we were texting last week about the offensive that Russia has been just bombarding onto Ukrainian civilians and otherwise.

We thought it would be appropriate today to get together to give you guys an update because Donald Trump's latest deadline for Putin, his latest 50-day deadline expired. And so now was supposed to be the moment where Big Tough Trump stood up to Putin and said, no, you're not allowed to do this war anymore. The deadline's expired. And just a few minutes ago,

I saw that he said that he was very disappointed. He's just very disappointed in Putin. So it doesn't seem like the deadline had a lot of teeth. So, Kieland, why don't you just kind of take the lens back here? You know, we had this since we last spoke, we had the summit, or whatever you want to call it, in Alaska. We have the European leaders and Zelensky go to D.C. And in the wake of all that, like what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine?

Well, look, I've been talking endlessly. Any rhetoric that comes out of the Kremlin about peace is just delay tactics so they can take more ground in this country. And Donald Trump keeps falling for this. The Alaska Summit was a win for Russia because there were American soldiers rolling out a red carpet for a dictator. And that was a great opportunity for Russian nationalists that also think that they own Alaska. That's basically all that happened from the Alaska Summit. And the weeks that have

gone by since then have basically been a continued bombardment of this country. I've just come back from the Dombas, and I've spoken to my friends and her son as well. These are cities close to the front lines, and nothing has slowed down for a second in those areas. I was literally sitting in a house in a place called Kramatorsk a few days ago. And every 30 seconds, there was either a cab or a grad landing around us, through the floor, everything shaking. And a couple of days ago, What are those words? What were landing around you? Cabs, these are basically Russian aerial bombs. They're huge bombs that can take out entire apartment blocks, literally just in one go,

and they're dropping them from airplanes all across the front lines. And they're also hitting roads and supply lines now. Like, there's no tomorrow. They're doing new assaults all across the front line in a place called Dobrabilia a couple of weeks ago. There was a Russian assault on motorbikes that went straight up past the front lines. So there's been a huge amount of activity on the front during this peace period. and it just shows that Putin was laughing the whole time at the West. And now that it's ended today, we can look back on what we've seen.

A couple of days ago, the British Council building was destroyed. The EU delegation building was destroyed. An American engineering company was destroyed, and a Russian drone landed 100 kilometers inside of Poland, literally inside of NATO's airspace. This is the piece that's happening right now. And it's an absolute joke, any question that Putin wants peace after this point. And today, which is the week that kids were supposed to start school again in Ukraine. They spent it in bunkers and shelters because there have been drones exploding in the sky all day today.

And the footage that you saw that I posted a few days ago was the second largest attack on this city since the full-scale invasion. It obliterated buildings. You could see the chaos and damage all around me. And that happened the day after Steve Wickoff left this city. And what Putin likes to do is gaslight Trump. Gaslight his entourage. Steve Wickoff is here, and there's a local joke that people in Kiev say, and that's the Wickoff air defense system that we should replicate but everywhere, they say as soon as he leaves,

that's when he starts to bomb the city again, bomb civilians, because he wants to pretend when his entourage are here, that he doesn't do that. Anytime Trump has a convoy here or any delegations here, Putin holds off hitting the city because he's gaslighting his presidency to pretend like he doesn't target civilians. He waits until they're gone, and then he bombards this place. I mean, there have been drones hitting the sky all day here. Again, children in bunkers. And it's, it's again, I don't know how many more times Trump needs to be screamed at and told that Putin doesn't want peace. I remember that amazing quote by Melania Trump, where, you know, Trump basically walked in and said, oh, I think I just finally got peace. I just spoke to Vladimir Putin. And his

wife turned around and said, really? They just hit a children's hospital. That seems strange. It doesn't seem like it's getting through. And I think at this point, the only way to handle these conversations is just to stop listening to any news coverage that uses the word peace and Russia in the same sentence. Don't even bother reading their headlines anymore, because it's not effective. It's not, it's, it means nothing. It was Russia that bombed an EU delegation building this week. It was Russia that bombed a British council building. It was Russia that bombed American company this week. It is Russia that is escalating every day. Yeah, your video outside the British consulate was really kind of remarkable. Can you just kind of talk about that? Where is that?

That's not anywhere near military targets, right? Like, where is it in the city? Like, what was the damage and what the impact is? That happened a 10-minute walk from here. This is bang right in the very, very, very city center. And it scared a lot of people that I know that live right here as well, people in media, people in government, who didn't expect the air defenses to not quite work as well

because it was right in a built-up area where shops, hairdressers were, where there were restaurants and cafes. I walk past that street every single day to go to my gym. So it's a pretty standard street. And I always, whenever I go to it, the aftermath of a missile attack, look around, look at the back streets. And sometimes I Google the companies that are there. And it was literally the British Council Building and the EU delegation building.

They were the only kind of serious headquarters that were based there. So I think it was to send a message. It's not a coincidence that Trump did that. That's Freudian. It's not a coincidence that Putin did that in the same week that this sort of fake peace deal ended. And it was to cause destruction, fear, and mayhem in the city. I watched those cruise missiles fire straight across the Danipro River as I was driving back from the front line. And I'd never seen anything like it, glass falling, people being pulled out, about 20 casualties, literally residential streets, these streets.

You're out on the streets now. We've seen a couple of people walk behind you. Is the vibe changing? Are people more hesitant to want to be walking around? I mean, no, Ukrainians have been putting up with this for years. They're not going to slow down now. Again, yesterday was the first day back at school for Ukrainian kids. And I didn't even know they did this until I started seeing videos of it.

I started seeing them do it, but they had this amazing celebration. The first day back in September, they give their school teachers flowers and presents every single one of them. I have no idea how these school teachers have even got the capacity to put all these flowers. I don't know where they put them all. But I remember when I was at school, I hated my first day back. I didn't want to be back. And here children celebrate going back. And there's kind of music playing everywhere.

And that happened, again, a couple of days after this missile attack, and that happened all across this country. Cities on the borders where the schools are permanently underground, cities like Sumi and Harkiv still celebrated their first day back. There's photos and videos of this all over Twitter, if you have a look. There's still music playing here on the first of September with airwate sirens. Yeah, with air raid sirens going off above. So even children carry on. And there's a really striking photo, though, that was posted. and it was of a bunch of shoes along the steps towards one of the schools here in Kiev.

And it was all the empty shoes of the kids that have died in the last year because of missile and drone attacks. And it was a way that kids could remember who should have been walking through those school gates. So there's also a memory of not just celebrating life, but the reality of the situation. This is happening at the exact same time that there are a million Ukrainian kids, a million plus, under occupation right now, living in occupied territories like Crimea, and like in the East, children that are being brainwashed denied their identity to the point where if their parents are even caught doing an online course where they can speak Ukrainian, they're taken from their parents. And there are videos coming out of Russian school kids going back to school wearing Soviet Army uniforms with rifles because Russia... You sent this to me. Is this real? Are these pictures real? Put them up on the screen here. This is crazy. They've got weapons? Like, what is that? It's a...

semi-automatic weapon that one of them's holding? Looks like she's maybe eight. Well, this is what schools all across Russia are doing this week. They're opening with ceremonies that are military ceremonies, teaching kids how to hold rifles, dressing them up in Soviet outfits, because Russia doesn't value life right now. They value war. That's all they care about.

They have decided to turn their country into a wartime economy and into a wartime country, and they're preparing their children for war on mass. all they care about right now. At the exact same time kids here are giving flowers to their teachers. And it just shows how much of a deep psychosis, mass psychosis, Russia is getting into, because this kind of propaganda is getting worse every year. There are leaflets that have just been given to teachers all across the occupied areas and the oblast in Russia that are literally 90% about military and army training and loving the motherland, the great bear of the motherland and fighting for the motherland. They are preparing every single generation.

for war because that's what they want. 30, 40 years from now, they want this to continue endlessly and they start this in the classroom. And looking back at this whole thing, war isn't just full in the trenches in this country. Wars fall in the classrooms through disinformation, through the education, through the fact

of the classrooms here are in basements and bunkers. So it's a crazy analogy, but it's what's happening, you know? It's 10 o'clock there in Ukraine. What are the bells? What are we hearing? This is, yeah, the really beautiful church behind. I don't know if you can quite see it, but every hour they play the bells,

which is really nice. Despite apparently Christianity being banned, there is still allow this. I don't know how Zelensky's letting this happen. Crazy. Is there any, I just, I hate to be just so depressing and bleak all the times. And even though it's a bleak scenario, so we have to be eyes wide open. But, you know, I felt like there was a period of time where they're thinking that Ukraine was, you know, gaining ground in the counteroffensive with the drones and that, you know, the campaign they had inside of Russia. How do they feel now? Like, what do you hear from, you know, people around Zelensky about, you know, about a plan for pushing back against us? I mean, things like Operation Spider-Web were amazing and there are probably 50 other versions of that

that are in the works right now. Ukraine have basically focused 90% of, of their strategy right now to hitting Russian oil refineries, because that is what's paying for this war right now. It's paying for the soldiers' salaries. They've realized that diplomacy isn't going to work and that America isn't going to help. So what they've done instead is hit Russia where it hurts in the bank accounts. It's working. There are traffic jams and queues right now all across Russia into gas stations. And if you read Russian national papers, yesterday, the 1st of September, they say that they're going to temporarily halt a lot of their Russian gas oil, a lot of Russian gas and oil exports because they need them for their own

country because their refineries are being destroyed. A pipeline that runs underneath this country that feeds Hungary has just been temporarily destroyed as well. And it's causing serious mayhem in Russia. And that is where the hope has shifted. It's not on the front line isn't moving right now. Well, it's moving slowly this way. But it's not like these major, major advances and AI and this cool technology. It's none of that is happening right now. Right now, it's Russia being hammered economically. Literally, the only way this ends is if Russia runs out of money. Russia's ambitions are to destroy this whole country.

That's not going to change. But if they can't afford it, they'll stop. And sanctions aren't going to work. So this country's just going to blow the hell out of their oil refineries. I mean, as they should, really. I mean, I'm down the middle journalist in a lot of ways. But if you step back for a second and look at what's actually going on here, the soldiers' salaries that have come here to kill people,

are paid by Gazprom's exports. And if you blow up those refineries, those are legitimate military targets, it's fine. Yeah. Well, I wish I could say that our, you know, the Republicans in Congress would be more aggressive right now after that deadline passed in doing what we could to put economic pressure on Russia.

But they talk a big game on that, but we continue to not see anything. So I don't think there's any reason to expect anything. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than disappointed by these guys, again. Well, all right, man. Stay safe out there. Yeah, it's been really great to catch up, and I'll let you know whatever happens in future. Good to see you, Kaelin. Everybody go check out his YouTube, all his social media feeds, go support his work. We'll really appreciate you.

We'll be talking to you soon. Stay safe.