WASHINGTON — At first glance, President Trump’s decision to relax U.S. sanctions on Russia despite its continuing invasion of Ukraine was a dramatic break from principles that guided American foreign policy for most of a century. Since the end of World War II, U.S.-Russian relations have oscillated between hostility and friendship, but one element was consistent: When Russia tried to take over one if its neighbors, the United States pushed back. This time, though, the United States appeared to favor the aggressor, not the victim.
Haass, a former senior State Department official under then-President George W. Trump has long expressed admiration for Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin — part of a syndrome one of his former aides, Fiona Hill, has called “autocrat envy.” “He wants to rule like them,” she said, referring to the president’s bromances with Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and other strongmen. Meanwhile, Trump often expresses disdain for democratically elected leaders of smaller countries, and he reserves a special loathing for the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.
He has repeatedly said Zelensky was foolish to resist Russia’s 2022 invasion because, in his view, the larger country is almost certain to win the war. Ukraine doesn’t have that kind of manpower.” Moreover, Trump has long believed U.S. companies could reap an economic bonanza from Russia’s resource-rich economy. As a real estate magnate, he spent 30 years seeking deals in Moscow; in 2008, his son Donald Jr. said Russians had provided the Trump Organization “a lot of our assets.” In the short run, the president hopes to boost Republican prospects in next week’s midterm elections by buying diesel fuel from Russia — a move aimed at lowering prices at the cost of bolstering Putin’s war economy. (It hasn’t worked; the price of diesel has risen slightly since Trump’s decision.) But he has a longer-term goals as well.
He has long believed better relations between the United States and Russia would be good for both countries, no matter who’s in power in Moscow. And he has long yearned openly for a Nobel Peace Prize — and one way might be to arrange a durable ceasefire in Ukraine. All those factors have led Trump to overturn two major elements of traditional U.S. foreign policy.
Instead of supporting Ukraine, the victim of a foreign military invasion, he’s been pressing the Zelensky to accept Putin’s demands for territory. So what President Trump is trying to do is get Ukraine out of the way. ... President Trump wants Zelensky to capitulate,” Hill said.
As he issued that advice, Ukraine’s army was experiencing interruptions with three forms of U.S. military help: Starlink, the communications system it uses to guide its anti-drone missiles; U.S.-provided early radar warnings of Russian missile attacks; and supplies of Patriot anti-missile weapons. U.S. officials claimed the three incidents were not deliberate — but to Ukrainians, they felt like a warning. Meanwhile, instead of putting pressure on Putin through the traditional means of economic sanctions, Trump said he was trying to entice the Russian leader to negotiate by giving him preemptive rewards.
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