As Russia and the US move to negotiate a peace treaty over Ukraine, all eyes are on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two men have seemingly decided to settle things bilaterally; the world’s most nuclear-armed bromance has never felt more consequential.
In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, during which they “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”.
Later that day, the President told reporters he and Putin would “meet in Saudi Arabia” and that while it was unlikely Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, “some of that land will come back”. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the Russian President agreed with Trump that it was time to work together.
The surprise conversation came just hours after a prisoner exchange. On Tuesday, Russia released Marc Fogel, an American schoolteacher and former diplomat, who had been serving a 14-year sentence for marijuana possession, in exchange for an unnamed Russian national who had been jailed in the US on money laundering charges.
Some fear the negotiations are an opportunity for Putin to claim a great victory. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, Sir Ben Wallace, the former Defence Secretary, wrote that the talks had “echoes of Nazi appeasement”, while others have talked of a “betrayal” of Ukraine that will cede swathes of territory to Putin.
The latest developments have fuelled a theory among former senior figures in US intelligence that Trump has been unwittingly cultivated by Putin. As far back as 2016, Michael J Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, argued that Putin was bringing his experience as a spy to bear on the future American President.
“President Vladimir V Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them,” Morell wrote in the New York Times. “That is exactly what he did early in the [2016 Republican] primaries. Mr Putin played upon Mr Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr Putin had calculated.”
If Putin was trying to make the new US President feel powerful this week, he could hardly have done more. Rather than an international community responding to an unprovoked invasion, the talk around Ukraine this week resembles Yalta or Versailles, with a handful of Great Men carving up the world.
It is telling that the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems hardly to be involved, let alone British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer or the other European leaders. On Thursday, Russia clarified that Ukraine would “of course” take part in any talks, after Zelenskyy said he would not accept a deal made without Ukraine. But it is clear who is in the driving seat.
Speculation about Trump’s relationship with Russia has swirled around him since he entered politics. At the far end of the spectrum is the idea that Trump is irrevocably compromised by secret kompromat (blackmail collateral) held on him in Russian vaults. Away from the more outlandish conspiracies, the truth may be that Putin has worked out, through experience and cunning, how to push Trump’s buttons and, in so doing, achieve his foreign policy ambitions.
“There have been lots of accusations that Trump’s a spy, including that ludicrous Steele dossier,” says John Foreman, who was UK defence attache to Moscow from 2019-2022.
“Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out. He’s released hostages. Some of his comments about common sense have been picked to resonate with [Trump].”
Additionally, he says, Putin flatters Trump’s world view: “Trump has been re-elected and he has a certain way of doing business. It’s hardball foreign policy realism, settling conflict by redrawing maps over the heads of other people using American power. It is pretty much how Putin sees the world as well. Trump spoke about how he got on well with Putin at Helsinki. Personal interaction matters, especially when he doesn’t have much relationship with Zelenskyy or Starmer.
“But it goes back to that deeper point about America as a great power, not beholden to the rules-based international order.”
Trump has been dogged by speculation about his ties to Russia since he first announced he was running for President, nearly a decade ago. In his pre-political life as a property developer he expressed sporadic interest in property deals in Moscow, before the infamous Miss America pageant in 2013.
A dossier drawn up by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele (and leaked in 2017) reported unsubstantiated allegations that while Trump was staying in Moscow for the pageant, he was filmed with sex workers, creating kompromat that Russia has been able to use against him since. In January 2017, as Trump took office for the first time, a declassified assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA argued that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign … to undermine public faith in the US democratic process” and damage Hillary Clinton’s credibility.
Since then, former agents and security officials on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly expressed their fears that Putin has used his KGB training to cultivate Trump. Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and stayed until 1991. Between 1985-1990 he worked undercover in Dresden, where he was a liaison to the Stasi while pretending to be a translator.
Most recently, last October, Leon Panetta, a former director of the CIA who served as Defence Secretary under Obama, said that Trump had “turned into a source for Putin, and somebody who can help him manipulate what he wants to get done”.
“I think Donald Trump in many ways is naive about who Putin really is,” Panetta told the One Decision podcast.
“[Putin] knows how to work a source and he’s got a source that is very near the top in this country. He, himself is going to engage that source.”
Some have claimed that the influence on Trump goes back even further. Yuri Shvets, a KGB major who was posted to Washington, DC in the 1980s, claimed that the Soviet Union started cultivating Trump more than 40 years ago.
American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump by journalist Craig Unger claims that the KGB identified Trump as a young businessman on the rise as early as 1977, after he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelnickova. Shvets, a source for the book, said that an electronics shop near Trump’s hotel, the Grand Hyatt New York, was really a KGB front. When the Trumps visited Russia for the first time in 1987, KGB operatives flattered Trump and told him he ought to go into politics.
“It was a charm offensive,” Shvets told The Guardian. “They had collected a lot of information on [Trump’s] personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.
“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the President of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called ‘active measures’ soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”
“Putin will be thrilled to have Trump as a negotiating partner,” Unger adds. “He’s an easy mark, a narcissist. The key is to flatter him. He looks up to Putin.”
Jack Barsky, an author and former undercover KGB agent in the US, says that Putin’s time in the KGB is better understood as part of a mythology, rather than a source of practical techniques and craft.
“Putin was trained and did well in German – and where was he deployed? East Germany. A friendly nation. Not where the action was. Clearly he was not considered a top-notch agent. That does not nullify the fact that he is a very clever politician. He managed to come out of security and get to the highest position in one of the most powerful countries on the planet. When people ask me what he learned in the KGB that has been useful in his political life, I just say ‘lie’.”
When the Mueller Report into Trump’s Russia connections was finally published in 2019, it found no evidence of grand conspiracy. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, agrees that while Trump “probably compromised himself” by borrowing money from Russian sources in the past when he was in financial difficulty, any notion of a long collusion is likely to be “rubbish”.
Besides, he adds, it is too soon to make any firm conclusions about what might happen in Ukraine: “It is easy to draw conclusions early and be pessimistic. But what people in Washington tell me very firmly is that Trump doesn’t want to start his administration with an Afghanistan moment [a reference to the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the Asian country in 2021].
“I think the relationship between Trump and Putin is pretty superficial. The national and international interests at stake are bigger than the egos of two people.”
Millions of Ukrainians, who have endured years of brutal war, will hope he is right.
The exchange of fire has scuppered plans for a new round of Iran-US nuclear talks.