There’s a lot President Donald Trump has failed to do to pressure Russia into genuine peace talks on Ukraine. But it's now being reported he asked President Volodymyr Zelenskyy if he could do the one thing that nobody in their right mind would suggest: bomb Moscow, the capital city of a paranoid nuclear superpower, using U.S. long-range missiles.

The White House says Trump was “just asking a question, not encouraging further killing.” Not knowing the identities or even nationalities of the unnamed officials cited in Tuesday’s Financial Times article, it’s hard to judge motivations for the leak or why the U.S. president might ask such a question. But given that he already boasted of threatening during his first term to “bomb the sh*t out of Moscow” if Putin attacked Ukraine, it can’t be dismissed out of hand that he was serious.

I’m going to guess that Trump’s claim to have threatened Moscow — made on the campaign trail and recorded by CNN — was just one more among countless falsehoods that he’s made for political ends. In this case, it would be to prove his otherwise ridiculous claim that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine had he remained in power after 2020. And if only to sleep soundly, let’s likewise assume that whatever Trump asked of Zelenskyy on July 4, it won’t result in the U.S. handing over state-of-the-art missiles marked for Moscow.

Given its merciless pounding of Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine, Russia needs to suffer a cost that deters it from continuing its unprovoked invasion. But which cost? Trump shied away from applying much safer forms of pressure on Putin as recently as Monday, when he announced that all future U.S. military transfers to Ukraine will have to be paid for by others (meaning that fewer weapons will be sent), and that he’d impose new sanctions to punish Putin’s warmongering only after another 50-day reprieve.

And that’s when he was supposedly getting tough. Since returning to office, Trump hasn’t just refused to authorize any new aid for Ukraine, he at times interfered with the shipment of arms – including for air defense – already authorized by his predecessor and en route to Kyiv. He also gave away key Ukrainian negotiating cards before talks with Russia even began, including acceptance that the country would never join NATO.

These were at best acts of enormous naivete on Trump’s part, requiring him to believe that if he made unilateral concessions to a career KGB officer who has mired himself in Europe’s largest war since 1945, the favor would be returned. Like many others, I’ve been quick to point out these mistakes, often justified by Trump and his supporters as bids to avoid World War III.

In the same way, former President Joe Biden was correctly criticized for overestimating the risk that Putin would carry through with bluster about unleashing nuclear war in response to Ukraine getting supplied with conventional U.S. weapons, from HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems to Abrams Tanks. All these U.S. hesitations were misjudgments that cost Ukrainian lives.

But to offer American missiles to bomb Moscow would be an altogether different matter. A success would humiliate Putin, a man who measures himself by his imperial predecessors in the Kremlin. It would expose his inability to defend even his own capital in a war he has falsely cast as a collective act of Western aggression.

If my assumptions and the White House spin are wrong, if Trump both said what the FT has reported and meant it, then there could be only one conclusion: That the most powerful man in the world would also be the most reckless.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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