How Trump and Putin Have Been Allies Against
Ukraine
Trump has long supported delegitimizing the now besieged country.
On
February 25, the day after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Lee
Smith published an essay in Tablet arguing
that Ukraine had brought on its problems. Smith, a house stenographer for
Representative Devin
Nunes and the author of two pro-Trump books, unburdened himself of
a long list of Ukrainian provocations. In 2014, Ukraine’s people rejected Vladimir
Putin’s generous offer to remain a Russian dependency and voted out his
handpicked presidential candidate. A few years later, Ukrainian Americans
accused Russia of hacking Democratic emails and extorting Volodymyr
Zelenskyy — the guilt for which, in Smith and Putin’s view, was shared
by the country their parents had fled. These defiant actions “reinforced
Putin’s view that, especially in partnership with the Democrats, Ukraine did
not understand its true place in the world as a buffer state.” The invasion was
a terrible shame, conceded Smith, but this is what happens when a country has the
temerity to offend Putin and Trump and assert its independence.
Putin’s war with
Ukraine is being fought to settle a single question: Does his
neighboring state have the right to make its own democratic decisions or must
it subsist as a Russian vassal?
President
Biden’s marshaling of a strong
and united European response has
thrown into sharp relief the contrast with his predecessor’s “America First”
bluster. But there is an even more fundamental contrast between Biden’s
multilateralism and Trump’s nationalism, one that goes beyond diplomatic skill
to core ideology: Many corners of the American right, including Donald
Trump, agree with Putin’s position.
Putin
views a democratic Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime for two very
good reasons. First, Ukraine’s majority prefers economic integration with
Europe rather than Russia. Second, all strongmen are mainly preoccupied with
maintaining power, and the existence of prosperous democracy in a neighboring
country is a dangerous counterexample.
Twenty
years ago, there was no significant reservoir of opposition to Ukrainian
independence and democracy. The burgeoning alliance between Russian
nationalists and America Firsters was set in motion when Paul
Manafort went to work for the pro-Russian Party of Regions in Ukraine
in 2004. Manafort, once one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington,
had begun a globetrotting career selling his services to dictators. His
Ukrainian client, Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, was Putin’s main
organ for maintaining control of his neighboring country.
Putin
nurtured a cadre of pliant Ukrainian oligarchs and functionaries who served a
devious double purpose. They would faithfully weaken Ukrainian democracy on his
behalf, and then he could turn around to the outside world and hold up
Ukraine’s corruption as a justification for why it should not be treated like a
real country.
He paired
this with a slowly escalating campaign of violence. Putin and his allies would
violently intimidate their political opposition to prevent them from gaining
control of Ukraine. In 2004, Putin’s agents poisoned Viktor Yushchenko, the
pro-western presidential candidate. (This occurred four years before the United
States invited Ukraine to join NATO, a sequence that shows Russia’s threats
against Ukraine drove its interest in joining the alliance, rather than the reverse,
as Putin and his defenders have suggested.) Ten years later, Manafort’s client
unleashed snipers and thugs to drive away peaceful protesters before a
democratic revolution forced him to flee the country. After Russophiles lost
control of Ukraine’s government, Putin started using militias to seize chunks
of territory.
At the
tail end of the Obama administration, both Democrats and Republicans supported
democratization, westernization, and reform in Ukraine. When the Obama
administration pressured Ukraine to fire ineffective prosecutor Viktor Shokin —
a key step forward for advancing the rule of law in Ukraine — a bipartisan
letter commended its efforts and did not draw any significant domestic
opposition.
Trump’s
rise introduced to the Republican Party a figure who shared Putin’s perspective
toward Ukraine and often echoed his propaganda. When Putin ginned up
demonstrations in eastern Ukraine as a pretext to hive off chunks of land in
2014, Trump gushed, “So
smart, when you see the riots in a country because they’re hurting the
Russians, Okay, we’ll go and take it over … You have to give
him a lot of credit.” After winning the nomination, Trump promised to consider
recognizing Putin’s land seizure because “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve
heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”
Trump
brought on Manafort to run his campaign, which further linked Ukraine’s
conflict with Russia to the American domestic struggle. Ukrainians released a
“black book” of evidence of secret payments by the previous, pro-Russian
regime, which implicated Manafort in an embezzling scandal for which he was
eventually convicted. After it hacked Democratic emails and released them to
aid Trump’s candidacy, Russia claimed it had been framed by Ukraine. Trump
subsequently endorsed this theory. (“They brought in another company that I
hear is Ukrainian-based,” he told the
Associated Press a few months after taking office. “I heard it’s owned by a
very rich Ukrainian; that’s what I heard.”)
Trump, of
course, was impeached the first time for pressuring Zelenskyy to smear Biden,
and his motive was primarily to gain an advantage over his opponent. But he
also had clearly absorbed Putin’s idea that Ukraine was corrupt and undeserving
of sovereignty. Trump regularly flummoxed his staff by insisting Ukraine was
“horrible, corrupt people” and “wasn’t a ‘real country,’ that it had always
been a part of Russia, and that it was ‘totally corrupt,’” the Washington Post reported. (The
element of Russian propaganda here is not the claim that corruption exists in
Ukraine, which is true, but the premise that this somehow destroys its claim to
sovereignty or justifies subjugation to its far more corrupt neighbor.)
By the
end of Trump’s presidency, the distinction between his agenda in Ukraine and
the Russian agenda in Ukraine was difficult to discern. In the aftermath of
Trump’s first impeachment, Rudy Giuliani inherited Manafort’s role as a liaison
to the pro-Russian elements in Ukraine’s polity. In his travels through the
country, Giuliani linked up with Party of Regions apparatchiks as well as known
Russian intelligence agents, ginning up business proposals and allegations to
fling against Biden. Trump’s agents, Russian agents, and pro-Russian Ukrainian
apparatchiks were speaking in almost indistinguishable terms.
That view
of the world is expressed cogently, if chillingly, in Smith’s essay depicting
Ukraine as a tool of the joint enemies of Putin and Trump. And it has bled
widely into the conservative mind. In the run-up to the 2020 election, numerous
right-wing pundits warned darkly that American liberals were fomenting a “color
revolution” akin to the pro-democratic uprisings that had broken out against
several of Putin’s vassal states. Both their narrative and their diction
depicted pro-democracy activists as a sinister cabal and Putin their innocent
victim.
By the
outset of Russia’s invasion, pro-Putinist rhetoric was common. “Ukraine, to be
technical, is not a democracy,” asserted Tucker Carlson. “And by the way,
Ukraine is a pure client state of the United States State Department.” To be
sure, this view remained a minority on the right — and just as many of Trump’s
most fervent supporters recoiled at the January 6 insurrection, even many Putin
defenders conceded a full-scale invasion went too far. Still, Putin’s claims
against Ukraine have received endorsements from both the right’s most popular
politician and its most popular media personality. That is not nothing.
It
remains to be seen whether the Biden administration’s combination of sanctions,
diplomacy, and military aid will be enough to save Ukraine from the predations
of its neighboring dictator. The military odds remain favorable to Russia. But
as Putin’s militarized irredentism grows larger on the world stage, an
increasingly relevant consideration in American politics is the fact that only
one American party truly disagrees with it.