WASHINGTON, March 29 – U.S. President Donald Trump, in a recent phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, said the U.S. will win the arms race if that’s the path Russia wants to go, NBC reported.

Putin's claim earlier this month that Russia has new nuclear-capable weapons that could hit the U.S., a threat he underscored with video simulating an attack, "really got under the president's skin," one U.S. official said.

So much so that after hearing Putin’s speech, Trump called the leaders of France, Germany and the U.K. to say the Russian leader sounded dangerous, so the four of them needed to stick together, according to a White House official familiar with the calls.

Two officials said Trump told Putin during a phone call last week after Putin's re-election: "If you want to have an arms race we can do that, but I'll win."

Trump added that he hoped that Putin’s comments were just election rhetoric and bragged that he’d just secured a $700 billion defense budget, the largest the U.S. has ever had, he said, according to one of the officials.

Trump's national security advisers spent months trying to convince him to sign off on a plan to supply new U.S. weapons to Ukraine to aid in the country's fight against Russian-backed separatists, according to multiple senior administration officials.

Yet when Trump finally authorized the major policy shift, he told his aides not to publicly tout his decision, officials said. Doing so, Trump argued, might agitate Putin, according to the officials.

"He doesn't want us to bring it up," one White House official said. "It is not something he wants to talk about."

In one instance afterward, Trump complained to his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, that his decision could really escalate the situation in Ukraine to a war.

McMaster, who was recently ousted, responded by telling the president there already is a war there, to which Trump shot back that the U.S. is not in it, an official said.

The White House declined to comment.

Officials said the increasingly puzzling divide between Trump's policy decisions and public posture on Russia stems from his continued hope for warmer relations with Putin and stubborn refusal to be seen as appeasing the media or critics who question his silence or kind words for the Russian leader.

Critics have suggested that Trump's soft approach to Putin has nefarious roots that are somehow entwined with Russia's interference in the 2016 election and the federal investigation into whether the president's campaign colluded in that effort, something the president has repeatedly denied. (nbc/ez)