Donald Trump’s policies have been unprecedentedly pro-Russian.
Until this week, when the US pressed the Kremlin to commit to a ceasefire, the Trump administration had apparently asked for nothing from President Putin, while making a series of unilateral concessions on behalf of the Ukrainians: ruling out Nato membership for Ukraine, demanding that they make territorial concessions, voting in Russia’s favour at the UN over the invasion, resuming diplomatic relations with Moscow. In his confrontation with President Zelenskyy last month, Trump took offence at what he called Zelenskyy’s “tremendous hatred” for President Putin.
As a result of all this, and bolstered by long-standing rumours, many – including Tory MP Graham Stuart, Democrat senator Jeff Merkley and retired US intelligence officers – have asked whether Trump is a Russian “asset”.
What sort of rumours?
The most recent, in February, was spread by Alnur Mussayev, a former KGB officer from Kazakhstan. He said on Facebook that Trump was signed up in Moscow in 1987 under the codename “Krasnov”. Trump visited Moscow that year, and he would have been under KGB surveillance. There have also been claims from Czech defectors that Czechoslovakian intelligence mounted an extensive spying operation on Trump, together with “friends” from the KGB, after he married a Czech model, Ivana Zelníková, in 1977.
The evidence for the first claim looks flimsy: Mussayev was not employed by the KGB in 1987, and never worked for the section of the organisation that recruited foreign spies. And there is certainly no evidence that either operation recruited Trump.
What other rumours are there?
The best-known were compiled in a dossier by Christopher Steele, a former head of MI6’s Russia desk, who did research into Trump for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Steele was sufficiently alarmed that he took his findings to US intelligence. He found that the Russian government was “working to get Mr Trump elected” in that year’s presidential election, and that his associates had met Russian agents, possibly to conspire with them.
The first two claims were later verified by the US special counsel Robert Mueller’s report – but it did not prove a criminal conspiracy. Steele also recorded a series of “unverified and potentially unverifiable” claims. The most lurid was that the FSB (formerly the KGB) has footage of Trump engaging in depraved activities with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013, which it uses as kompromat: blackmail material. There is no proof of this. Trump does, though, have a long financial relationship with Russia.
What financial relationship?
Trump tried to expand his property empire into Russia, with little success. But Russian money saved his floundering businesses in the 1990s, when bankruptcies had made him toxic to US lenders. A Russian-American mobster named Felix Sater poured cash into Trump’s businesses. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this,” Sater wrote in a 2015 email.
For years, the only bank that would lend to Trump’s property empire was Deutsche Bank, which was later fined record sums for laundering Russian money. It’s likely the Russian authorities were aware of all this. But, as his defenders point out, Russian investors weren’t unusual in the New York property world at that time. One former partner said: “The only people who were willing to [invest] were tasteless Russians, people who like the absurd, ostentatious gold-leaf lifestyle he has.”
Why is Trump so pro-Putin?
On a personal level, he likes Putin and he dislikes Zelenskyy. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during the Oval Office confrontation. This was a reference to Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election (such as the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails) – a probe Trump always portrays as a “witch hunt” by his political opponents. When Trump met Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Putin denied Russian involvement. Trump broke with US intelligence’s conclusion that the Russians had interfered in the election by accepting this at face value; he has long held the unfounded belief that it was Ukraine doing the interference.
Another sore point is his first impeachment in 2019, which was triggered by the revelation that he had withheld arms from Ukraine in an effort to pressure Zelenskyy into investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in the country. (Zelenskyy resisted.) Because of this, Trump sees Ukraine, broadly, as a corrupt nation in league with his political enemies.
What other reasons does he have for supporting Putin?
Maga is premised on America First isolationism, which often tips over into support for Russia. Trump despises Biden and his policies, including support for Ukraine. But beyond that, Trump and Putin have much in common politically: both dislike the liberal international order because it limits their power; both, for different reasons, dislike Nato. Trump openly admires strongmen such as Putin; he has shown a Putin-style desire to “manage” elections. Finally, he is famously transactional, and feels that Russia has a great deal more to offer him and America than Ukraine.
So what really is going on?
There’s no evidence Trump is a Russian asset; but he clearly has a certain regard for Putin and Russia. He was echoing Russian propaganda long before he called Zelenskyy a dictator or claimed he started the war. In 2018, Trump defended Russia’s takeover of Crimea. In 2022, he called the invasion of Ukraine “genius”.
“I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV,” said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. His loyalties will be tested in the coming weeks.