For a US leader with an imperturbable belief in his deal-making prowess, the prospect of playing peacemaker and a chance to restore a closer bi-lateral relationship between Moscow and the US to the centre of his presidency has both personal and political allure.
The quest for a truce has thrown the relationship between the two dominant leaders on the world stage into stark relief. The Putin and Trump interplay is also a contest for the upper hand – or as Lenin neatly put it of such things, “kto kovo” (who gets the better of whom?).
Victory Day parade in Red Square in 2024. The only Kremlin offer has been a single day of hostility cessation at Easter (to appease the Orthodox Church) and a three-day ceasefire promised from the 8 May holiday (Photo: Contributor/Getty Images)The one figure the President has come to trust to carry out his (often changeable) wishes towards Moscow is a fellow business investor, Steve Witkoff, who has been dispatched repeatedly to Saudi Arabia and Moscow to get the deal done.
As progress has stalled, Trump has pivoted from tactics which were essentially focused on dealings with Putin to the exclusion of Ukraine’s Volodmyr Zelensky to a triangular dynamic. Having dressed down a frustrated Ukrainian leader at a White House encounter that ended in a fractious row a few weeks ago, Trump has shunted blame for the war and failure to make peace between the two countries.
In the past couple of weeks, however, Trump’s patience with Putin’s equivocations has worn thin. Meeting Zelensky at the Pope’s funeral at the weekend, the ambience was amicable, even supporting Zelensky’s determination to protect his country and it was Moscow that got a scolding for continuing air strikes on Ukraine as “very bad timing”.
Having covered the Kremlin and wars on the Russian periphery since the 90s and the rise of the Russian leader to prominence and the embrace of a Soviet doctrine, amped up by a personal determination to eliminate Ukraine’s independence and military capacity and use the opportunity to push back Nato in Eastern Europe, I would say going “back to life,” in any durable sense of a lasting peace is improbable.
Much depends then on the interplay of two men who see themselves as the centre of a particular worldview – and allies or enemies as secondary. I have met both briefly and in Trump’s case, had a short conversation on the eve of his 2016 election win.
Donald Trump meets Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Trump has pivoted from tactics focused on dealings with Putin to the exclusion of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to a triangular dynamic (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/AP Photo)Putin keeps his distance from visitors and especially westerners. Outside formal occasions, he also retains the old Soviet leaders’ reluctance to meet ordinary Russians and is believed to use body doubles and manipulated social media to appear to do so a lot more than he does. Trump is large, noisy and aften rambling. Small, neat and judo trained, Putin rattles off talking points and digs at foes in rapid-fire Russian.
The man captured by sly social media taggers in Russia wearing a succession of the world’s most expensive watches was brought up in hardscrabble circumstances of beatings and poverty. That changed fast in the time I covered Putin’s rise from KGB mid-ranker to power in Moscow.
Flattering to keep hold of the Crimea
Today, an appetite for far greater luxury is shared with his US equivalent: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida complex is a palace of gilded furnishings and lavish facilities. The Russian leader’s retreat is dubbed “Putin’s palace,” a vast luxury complex on the Black Sea, closed to outsiders, where he lives with his partner who is rarely seen in public, the ex-gymnast Alina Kabaeva and their two sons, aged around 10 and six. Their affinity is a mixture of strongman attraction – and for Trump, payback for the “Russia hoax” – opponents’ accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election which brought him to power.
As the former head of MI6 Alex Younger puts it, Putin has “only one plan which is to flatter Trump into giving him what he wants.” That means an end to the fighting which established Russia as in de facto control of the strategically vital Crimea peninsula – and gives it sway in which parts of occupied territory are kept or handed back and on what terms.
Vladimir Putin, left, and Donald Trump arrive at the 2019 G20 Summit. The quest for a truce has thrown the relationship between the two dominant leaders into stark relief (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP)The Kremlin boss has jailed, exiled, blackmailed and silenced those who challenge him, presiding over an unnatural rate of people who went out of favour for political or business reasons, falling out of high windows shortly afterwards.
Trump’s interest in Russia and its potential has long roots. When he helped take the Miss Universe pageant there in 2013, Trump coquettishly commented that he hoped Putin would “become my best friend”. Lurid but unsubstantiated accounts have done the rounds on whether he had a sexual encounter there which was being used as kompromat. That, like many stories of Putin being some form of KGB asset is a hardy perennial among conspiracy theories as to why Trump is keen on closening ties in the former Soviet capital.
One recent MI6 figure formerly monitoring Russia believes it is “perfectly possible or even probable that the KGB saw in Trump a ‘person of interest’ to be cultivated and to monitor” as a result of this and subsequent encounters. “But that is a different and much wider group from being an active recruit.”
President Donald Trump (R) attends a meeting with President Vladimir Putin at the 2019 G20 summit. One recent MI6 figure formerly monitoring Russia believes it is ‘perfectly possible or even probable that the KGB saw in Trump a “person of interest” to be cultivated and to monitor’ (Photo: Brendan Smialowski /AFP)
He is rash – but not foolish when it comes to protecting himself. Yet he assists Moscow’s agenda by adopting many of its favoured talking points and bugbears – including the thesis that Nato “expansion” is to blame for endangering Russia’s security. Crucially, he has moved close to accepting the Putin argument that Moscow enjoys a “sphere of interest” beyond its borders and can therefore justifiably curtail freedoms and limit its neighbour’s autonomy.
Shortly after the Maga President marks his 100th day in office, his Russian counterpart will celebrate a holiday which harks back to an era of Stalin’s wartime rule – and sweeping oppression of Ukraine’s struggle for nationhood. The country’s name literally means “on the edge” – of Russia’s historic empires and Europe. That status has often brought Ukraine war and enmity from Moscow.
Whatever the “art of the deal” finally brewed up between the White House and the Kremlin and an antiseptic handshake, don’t bank on that changing.
Anne McElvoy is a former Moscow correspondent for The Times and now executive editor at Politico Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Trump’s long-standing infatuation with Putin is about to meet its ultimate test )
Also on site :