Putin is waiting to see what Trump in the White House may bring him
WASHINGTON, DC – If American voters thought the controversy over Donald Trump’s links to the Kremlin was behind them, the days leading up to the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine have shown that what the former president dismisses as “the Russia hoax” may dominate yet another election cycle.
In the week since Alexei Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison camp, the language used to describe events in Russia has become increasingly heated on all sides of the US political debate.
On Friday, Joe Biden unveiled hundreds of new sanctions to “ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home”. At a fundraising event on Wednesday, the President – off microphone – described Putin as a “crazy SOB”, having previously blamed the Kremlin leader and his “thugs” for the still-unexplained death of Russia’s opposition figurehead.
As Biden was making his comments in San Francisco, Trump was sitting down for a soft-soap interview with Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham in South Carolina. Answering a question about the $450m fine imposed against him by a New York judge overseeing his civil fraud trial, Trump compared himself to Navalny, insisting that he was just as put-upon as Putin’s now-deceased nemesis.
“It’s a form of Navalny,” said Trump, describing what he said was his ordeal at the hands of prosecutors across the land. He otherwise maintained his silence about Russia’s bravest man, neither paying him a tribute nor commenting on the likelihood that he had been dispatched at Putin’s behest.
“He’s comparing himself to Navalny? Because he’s in a court case, where Navalny lost his life to Putin?” asked an incredulous Nikki Haley, Trump’s remaining challenger for the Republican presidential nomination. She called Trump “obsessed with himself” and said he is becoming “meaner and more offensive by the day”.
A Washington Post investigation this week found that at no point in Trump’s presidency did he ever mention Navalny, even as the dissident was fighting for his life after an attempted poisoning in August 2020.
Trump is not alone among Republicans who overlooked the Kremlin critic. Former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson found no moment during his two-hour televised encounter with Putin earlier this month to utter the still-alive Navalny’s name.
“You’ve now got a Putin wing of the Republican Party,” former Congresswoman Liz Cheney observed this week. “I believe the issue this election cycle is making sure the Putin wing of the Republican Party does not take over the West Wing of the White House.”
That could be a tall order. The party of Ronald “Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall” Reagan has become captive to far-right Trump followers who accept Putin’s brutality with a shrug. The future of US financial support for Ukraine is caught in their vice-like grip.
Biden’s efforts to persuade the House of Representatives to approve an additional $60bn in military assistance have, so far, come to naught. Trump has instructed his loyalists to block the proposal at every turn.
Last week, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – a prominent Trump ally – told Sky News that Lord David Cameron “can kiss my ass”, when asked about the Foreign Secretary’s warnings about the urgency of fresh aid for Kyiv.
At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Trump surrogate J D Vance, an Ohio senator, took a less offensive – but still hardline – position. “I’ve never once argued that Putin is a kind and friendly person,” Vance told a panel discussion that included Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy. “He’s a person with distinct interests, and the United States has to respond to that. The fact that he’s a bad guy does not mean that we can’t engage in basic diplomacy.” Vance went on to claim: “There are a lot of bad guys all over the world.”
Trump insists that were he still in the White House, the war on Ukraine would never have reached its second anniversary. He claims – without offering any of the salient details – that he can resolve the conflict “in 24 hours”. Notably this week, he again failed to respond to Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated efforts to entice the former US president to visit Kyiv,and join him on a tour of the front lines. Vance, in Munich, warned Ukraine to prepare to surrender territory in eventual peace negotiations.
Biden officials concede that Putin is now playing a waiting game. On Thursday, undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland said the Russian leader “will probably wait and see what politics brings him” – a reference to the possibility that a second Trump administration might prove more propitious for the Kremlin than the Biden White House.
Nuland urged the American public to use the current congressional recess as an opportunity to deluge their elected officials with messages of support for Ukraine. Republicans will “have to answer if they don’t support this funding”, she said, adding that Putin “thinks he can wait Ukraine out… we need to prove him wrong”.
Nuland described herself as a “born optimist”. But two years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, seasoned members of Washington’s foreign policy elite know that it will take more than a sunny disposition to save Ukraine if Trump triumphs in November.
