Brian Kilmeade Warns Donald Trump Shows Putin Too Much Respect

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade broke with President Donald Trump over his diesel deal with Russia on Friday. He told Trump's former ambassador to the European Union that the president "has more respect for Vladimir Putin than he should."

The remarks on The Brian Kilmeade Show came a week after Trump announced the deal with Putin. Ukraine was also coming off a midweek outage of its military satellite internet. Kilmeade's guest, Gordon Sondland, who served as ambassador to the EU in Trump's first term, made the same case: Washington gave Moscow sanctions relief and got no ceasefire in return.

Brian Kilmeade Says Putin Made Trump 'Look Bad'

Kilmeade said Putin had repaid Trump with nothing.

"I just can't agree with the president. He has more respect for Vladimir Putin than he should," he said. "And Vladimir Putin has not made him look good. Look what happened after Alaska, nothing. Look what happened after that phone call, nothing. He said, we're gonna have a energy truce. He bombed the energy grid of the Ukrainians the next day. That makes the president look bad. I don't know why he would tolerate that."

He also questioned whether the deal was legal. "I'm pretty sure we can't buy energy from Russia. So I'm not sure the president can even do this, but why would he do it? It makes absolutely no sense," he said.

The administration settled the legal question itself. On Oct. 9, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a general license authorizing "the sale, delivery, offloading, or importation" of Russian diesel through April 7, 2027, NBC News reported.

Gordon Sondland: Putin 'Took the Candy'

Sondland said he could not see what Washington got for the deal.

"I don't understand why the president did this with Putin without extracting a true ceasefire, at least a temporary one," he said. "Putin, you know, took the candy and is now making mileage out of it."

Kilmeade then played a clip of Robert O'Brien, Trump's national security adviser in his first term, defending the deal. "The Europeans have bought $300 billion in Russian oil and gas," O'Brien said. "The Europeans are buying Russian oil and gas for their consumers, but Americans aren't supposed to buy it for American consumers."

Europe paid about €231 billion ($267.8 billion) for Russian fossil fuels from the 2022 invasion through December 2025, the Kyiv Post reported, short of O'Brien's figure.

Sondland said the issue was how the deal looked. "The Europeans have always been buying Russian energy," he said. "But for Trump to introduce this as a incentive to Putin to come to the table without actually extracting some kind of concession in return, again, is mystifying to me."

Sondland did not dismiss Trump's aims. "I know what he's trying to do and what he's trying to do in the long run is the right thing," he said. "But you don't all of a sudden hand the guy all of these benefits without extracting concessions at the same time."

He warned that the signals of recent days "are really, really bad for Ukraine."

The Trump-Putin Sequence Kilmeade Cited

Trump announced the energy ceasefire on Truth Social on Sunday. Russian strikes followed, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv, a gas production facility and a civilian gas station, PBS NewsHour reported. That is the sequence Kilmeade described: a truce announced Sunday, then strikes on Ukrainian energy sites.

Kilmeade said Ukraine lost U.S. intelligence and Starshield coverage and "for two days we were blind." Starshield, the military version of SpaceX's Starlink, was interrupted for terminals moving at high speed. A Ukrainian Defense Ministry source said service was fully restored, The Moscow Times reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his British counterpart that access had been restored, The Irish Times reported.

Kilmeade Presses on the Cutoff

Later in the show, speaking with former CIA officer Dan Hoffman, Kilmeade returned to the interruption of intelligence sharing and Starshield. "There's a sense the president did not know in Ukraine that we did both those things. And I'm capable of finding out, and I will," he said.

He then said "Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner threatened that to the Ukrainians if you don't stop bombing the refineries." The envoys warned Ukrainian negotiators in Miami that intelligence sharing could be restricted, the Kyiv Post reported. A U.S. official disputed that it was an explicit threat but confirmed that the envoys said Washington expected reciprocity.