President Trump Tells NBC News He Is ‘Very Angry’ And ‘Pissed Off’ At Vladimir Putin

President Donald Trump told NBC News’s Kristen Welker early Sunday he took exception to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Friday call for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be removed from office.

Trump, speaking over the phone, said he was “very angry” with and “pissed off” by Putin.

Putin weighed in Friday from the sidelines of the International Arctic Forum in Murmansk in northwestern Russia about the war in Ukraine. He said his country could negotiate with the West “under the auspices of the UN, the possibility of establishing a transitional administration in Ukraine,” according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Trump told NBC News that Putin’s remarks were “not going in the right location” and that Russia risked being hit with secondary tariffs.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump told NBC News.

“That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States,” Trump added. “There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25-to-50-point tariff on all oil.” (RELATED: ‘The Only One Who Can Do It’: Keith Kellogg Explains Trump’s Move Against Putin That He Says Could End The War)

Russian oil imports into the U.S. fell from over 245 million barrels in 2021 to 10,000 barrels in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Putin also said a transitional government was needed in Ukraine “[t]o organize a democratic presidential election that would result in the coming to power of a competent government that would have the confidence of the people, and then begin negotiations with these authorities on a peace agreement and sign legitimate documents,” AFP reported.

Ukraine has been under martial law as approved by its constitution since Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022 invasion. Zelenskyy’s domestic challengers agreed for elections to be suspended until after the war, according to the AFP.

Putin, in power in Russia since the turn of the century, is currently in his fifth four-year term as president and served for one-term as prime minister. Russian elections witness no credible opposition to Putin, who has alleged since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that the smaller country was not a democracy, AFP reported.

Trump called Zelenskyy “a dictator with no elections” in February 2025 and accused Ukraine of starting the war after the Ukrainian leader accused Trump of living in Russia-fueled disinformation, according to the BBC. The criticism occurred around the same time envoys from the U.S. and Russia met to discuss the war. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy would later publicly spar at the Oval Office in Washington, leading to a pause in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s efforts to pursue the end of the war between Russia and Ukraine nevertheless continued. A limited ceasefire aimed at guaranteeing safety along the Black Sea shipping route and stopping long-range strikes on energy infrastructure was announced March 25, The Associated Press reported.