Putin's faced some tough US presidents. Not this one

Vladimir Putin (left) and Donald Trump. (Source: AP photo/File)

Donald Trump told Fox News on Sunday that nobody’s been tougher on Russia than him, and as US and Ukrainian officials were preparing to meet in Saudi Arabia this week, I thought it would be useful to test the claim.

Trump came out of the gates strong in his first term, when in 2018 he sent 37 Javelin anti-tank launchers to Kyiv, with 210 of their missiles. This broke with the Obama administration’s policy to offer only non-lethal aid, and the Javelins, while few, played a significant role when Putin tried to seize Kyiv in February-March 2022. They were used to stop the lead vehicles of tank columns, allowing Ukraine’s Soviet-era artillery to deal with the rest.

Trump’s first administration also imposed sanctions on Russia, in response to allegations that included interference in the 2018 US congressional elections, cyberattacks, propping up a dictatorship in Venezuela, continuing to occupy Crimea and poisoning British citizens in the UK. In all, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, counted 52 policy actions Trump took toward the Kremlin in his first term, a record often at odds with his more favorable rhetoric.

But that was Trump 1.0, before he’d lost his reelection bid and then faced a rash of sometimes humiliating lawsuits. It was also before the Biden administration took a vastly more decisive — if still inadequate — approach to sanctioning Russia and arming Ukraine and before Trump assembled a small army of loyalists to populate the executive.

But just as important is that Trump appeared to solidify his relationship with President Vladimir Putin. According to Bob Woodward’s book War, the two men had up to seven private phone calls while the former and future US president was out of office. Bromance is too vague and flippant a term for what seems to have emerged. It’s more a mix of the admiration for Putin that Trump always had, with a newer, deeper bond of shared suffering at the hands of US Democrats and liberals in Europe.

I’ve gone back several times to rewatch the press conference that incinerated the US relationship with Ukraine on Feb. 28, and several things stand out. First, this was not – as some have claimed - a premeditated ambush by Trump. He clearly began with the assumption that Kyiv had dropped its opposition to the rapacious minerals deal that the US was demanding President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sign. Trump intended to appear magnanimous in victory, and for most of the 46 minutes, he was.

The meeting was blown up by Vice President JD Vance, whose finger-jabbing attack on Zelenskiy forced Trump to assert his dominance in the room. There’s only one moment of Trump’s performance in which he seemed to speak from the heart, and it was when he leapt to defend Putin against Zelenskiy’s depiction of him as a wanton killer.

“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump said. “It was a Democrat scam and he had to go through that, and he did go through it. We didn‘t end up in a war and he went through it.”

I can’t fathom the state of mind needed to sympathize with a former KGB agent for doing what he’d consider to be his job, and using that to attack the man whose country Putin has been trying to destroy since 2014. But it seems clear Trump feels a personal bond with Russia’s leader, and that this has strengthened since his first term.

What’s beyond doubt is that the ledger on Trump’s toughness toward Russia looks dramatically different since he retook the White House. Putin has made any ceasefire talks conditional on a number of elements, the core of which is no NATO membership, acceptance of his territorial annexations, plus unconstitutional elections aimed at sowing division in Ukraine and removing Zelenskiy from power. Trump has either granted or pressed for all of these conditions. But when Zelenskiy tried to insist on one of his own in the Oval Office - security guarantees to insure against further invasions - Trump pulled all military and intelligence support for Ukraine.

There have been immediate results in terms of battlefield losses for Kyiv, as well as the number of Russian missiles able to penetrate Ukrainian air defenses. This beleaguered country, Trump repeated when pressed on Fox, may not survive. The implication that he didn’t care was evident.

This, as Putin has made no secret of saying, is the Kremlin’s ultimate goal: the end of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign state. It is also Europe’s nightmare, as it would bring Russian troops and missiles to a vast new stretch of its borders. The irony should be lost on nobody; that Putin would be doing in reality, what he accused the West of merely intending.

Trump, meanwhile, has been effusive in his praise for Putin. The one piece of public pressure applied to Russia has been a threat to impose more sanctions if Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire talks. In contrast to Ukraine’s treatment, nothing has been done and the only potential measures specified would impact US-Russia trade, which at $3.5 billion last year, was trivial.

If Ukraine’s negotiators in Saudi Arabia worry that Trump has not only abandoned them but switched sides, their fear would be reasonable. Optimistically, this is the result of his belief that as a talented business negotiator, he has the smartest strategy in the room; Zelenskiy has become an obstacle to remove, because he just doesn’t get it. But real estate and geopolitics aren’t the same. In business you win or lose, get a good or a bad price and walk away. Maybe your company goes bankrupt, but you can start another.

In international relations, people die and countries collapse. Most deals are never truly concluded because they have so many ramifications. It’s a game of multi-board chess rather than checkers.

A much worse scenario is that Trump is indeed playing chess and knows what he’s doing. In that case, he’s deliberately ceding Eastern Europe to Moscow as a sphere of influence, weakening Western Europe – which the 47th US president sees as an economic and ideological rival – and setting new international norms consistent with his seizing a stronger sphere of control for the US in Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Panama. We’ll find out which it is all too soon.

Credit: Bloomberg