According to the Russian TV website on September 25, US President Donald Trump said he would no longer call Russia a "paper tiger" in the future.
Trump also said on Monday that Russia had failed to defeat Ukraine in three and a half years of fighting and was “trapped in serious economic difficulties,” adding that Ukraine had a chance to “take back all of its territory.”
However, when meeting with Turkish President Erdogan at the White House on the 25th, Trump said that he "will never call anyone a paper tiger again". However, he still seems to stick to his previous evaluation of the Russian army, saying that although Russia has invested a lot of manpower and material resources, it has "hardly seized any land" recently.
According to reports, Kremlin spokesman dmitry peskov responded to Trump's "paper tiger" remarks on the 24th: "Russia is not a tiger, and people often associate Russia with bears. There is no such thing as a'paper bear 'in the world, Russia is a real bear."
The New York Post, citing an anonymous White House source, said in a report on Thursday that Trump’s recent “bad speech” about Russia was a “strategic move” to get Russia back to the negotiating table.