When Donald Trump won the American presidential election in November 2016, it seemed to many that the real victor was Putin. The Russian team of hackers and leakers had disrupted the campaign of Trump’s main opponent, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton. There were claims that Putin had some secret hold over Trump – that the Russians had personal information that, if disclosed to the media, would wreck Trump’s career.1
The election caused a shock wave in American politics. In the summer, the opinion polls had Hillary Clinton as the front runner. Though Trump’s campaign was dogged by scandalous revelations, he rejected them all as ‘fake news’. Blustering and boasting, he attacked his own Republican Party’s leaders with the same ferocity he turned on the Democrats, and presented himself as the only candidate with the will to challenge what he depicted as the cosy corruption in Washington. He threw away the standard political rulebook and ranted at the media, and made a virtue of never having been a professional politician.
As some of Trump’s links with Russia came to light, his difficulties grew. Commentators noted how his statements often overlapped with allegations on the RT television channel about the fraudulent methods being used by the Clinton team. Another regular item on RT was Trump’s charge that Obama had no right to be elected American president.2 Into this melee flowed a leak by WikiLeaks of the Democratic National Committee’s internal email traffic, which appeared to show that dirty tricks were played to undermine Clinton’s Democrat rival contender Bernie Sanders. Clinton had a decidedly tough policy on Russia, and it was reasonably supposed that the Russian intelligence services were working to discredit her. Contacts were made between members of the Trump team and intermediaries of the Russian leadership, which had a distinct preference for Trump in the presidency. The feeling was mutual. On 27 October Trump showed his colours when he said of Clinton at a rally in Springfield, Ohio, ‘She speaks very badly of Putin, and I don’t think that’s smart.’
Putin called on the West to face up to the reason why its societies had turned against their political establishment in recent elections and referendums:
At first, these inconvenient results were hastily declared an anomaly or a fluke. When they started to be repeated, people said that society does not understand those at the summit of power and has not yet matured to the point of being able to assess the authorities’ endeavours and concern for the public good. Or they become hysterical and declare it the result of foreign, usually Russian, propaganda.3
His point about popular disenchantment in America and Europe was well made, but typically he fudged the part that Moscow played in fomenting trouble.
Putin refrained from saying anything publicly that might encourage Trump’s enemies to increase the pressure to investigate the Russian shenanigans. Already there were suspicions that the Trump team had colluded with intermediaries from Russia who fed his campaign with hacked data that would wound Clinton. Rumours spread that the FSB had a hold over Trump, either because of commercial deals he had done with Russians or because its agents had filmed him in sexually compromising circumstances on a visit to St Petersburg. On 15 December Obama indicated that practical measures would be put in hand to retaliate against Russian political interference.
In early January 2017, before Trump stepped into the White House, a dossier came to light that purported to summarize some sleazy past adventures involving Trump and Russian prostitutes in the Ritz Carlton in Moscow. Quite apart from the sexual allegations, there was an accusation that Trump on several visits to Russia had benefited from a cosy relationship with the Russian authorities, who had cultivated him as a person of influence. Trump had found a welcome in the Russian capital when hosting the 2013 Miss Universe ‘pageant’ in Moscow. There were also stories that the Russians had helped to bail out Trump’s various financial difficulties over the years. The dossier went online too late to have an impact on the election, and Trump immediately rejected its claims as ‘phony’ and ‘fake’. The author was revealed to be Christopher Steele, a former UK MI6 officer who was co-owner of a London-based business-intelligence firm. It was also revealed that Steele had collected the material on behalf of the Democratic Party in the months before the presidential election.4
Putin felt compelled to contribute to the discussion:
This is firstly an adult and secondly a person who for many years, albeit not for his whole life, was engaged in organizing beauty contests and mingled with the world’s most beautiful women. You know, I find it hard to imagine that he ran off to meet up with our own girls of reduced social responsibility – even though they are absolutely the best in the world. But I doubt that Trump fell for that.5
Trump’s links with the Russian authorities before and during the electoral campaign were as yet a matter of speculation, but enough was known to make it likely Putin would pay a price for his mischief. If Clinton had beaten Trump to the White House, she would have initiated a systematic inquiry into Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee email correspondence in summer 2016 – the leaked messages had disrupted the Clinton campaign for some weeks. She would also have ordered an investigation into allegations that Russians were responsible for anti-Clinton social media campaigns throughout the year. Trump’s victory itself sparked investigations by the American media and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The result was a daily seepage of embarrassing material into the public domain which served to narrow Trump’s scope to achieve his stated goal of an improved relationship with the Kremlin in foreign policy. Trump was distrusted in Russian affairs as much by his fellow Republicans in the Senate as by the Democrats. He had played hard and rough at electoral poker, and Putin had stood behind his chair and helped him to raise the stakes. Now he found the price of victory was not being able to cash in his chips.
Throughout his campaign Trump had been complimentary about Putin. In power, he now had to take care to avoid seeming to be Putin’s catspaw. Putin, meanwhile, had to hope for the best. When asked about Russian interference in American politics, his reaction was either to feign offence at the question or to declare that Kremlin leaders had better ways of spending their time than leaking the emails of American public figures. Russian leaders bided their time: Lavrov spoke of having no illusions about settling Russia’s difficulties with the United States,6 an attitude widespread in Russia. By April 2017, according to a VTsIOM survey, only a third of Russians felt optimistic about the course of Russo-American relations. Two out of five had a negative opinion about Trump.7 Russian caution seemed justified when the new American president, a week after his inauguration, paid a visit to the Pentagon and signed an upgrade plan for America’s nuclear weapons forces.8
The Russian leadership was in the dark about what Trump’s next foreign policy moves would be. Putin revealed he had only one telephone conversation with Trump before his inauguration, and that the first one with the new president did not take place until 2 May 2017, when – according to the Russian account – they agreed to coordinate action against international terrorism and enable a ‘real process of regulation’ of the Syrian situation, as well as try to lower tensions in the Korean peninsula. The two presidents planned further contact by telephone in advance of the G20 summit in Hamburg in July.9 The pair went onto first-name terms, though Putin did not yet use the familiar ‘you’ form when addressing him in Russian.10
Still Putin continued to suggest that America was a chronic offender against international law around the world, demanding that the American political leaders admit the reasonableness of Russia’s security concerns. When a United States naval vessel with cruise missiles on board set out into the Black Sea, nobody in Washington seemed to understand the anxiety this caused in Moscow. But Romania had joined NATO back in 2004, and the Americans took it for granted that as allies they could conduct operations off the Romanian coast. To Russian eyes, it was provocative for the American navy to sail out into waters adjacent to Russia’s coastline with ballistic missiles, and Russian warplanes were sent to ‘buzz’ the NATO ship. Far from being aggressive, Putin remarked, the Russians were exhibiting remarkable self-restraint.11 Quite what he thought Russia had grounds for doing beyond buzzing American vessels, he omitted to make clear. His chief aim was to sound menacing.
Russo-American relations deteriorated when on 2 February 2017 Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, called for an end to the Crimean occupation.12 This was only the start of the Kremlin’s irritation. On 15 February 2017 the ex-Soviet Baltic States signed an agreement to permit NATO troops of other countries to transit their territories. In Moscow, it was immediately greeted with annoyance that the governments in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius were enabling America and its allies to reach the Russian border within hours. On 16 February US Defense Secretary James Mattis added to Russian fears by stressing that America should deal with Russia from a position of strength.
On 20 March 2017 FBI Director James Comey came before the House Intelligence Committee to testify about ‘Russian active measures’ during the previous year. Accusing Putin of having a personal hatred for Hillary Clinton and encouraging a ‘multifaceted campaign’ to aid Donald Trump’s presidential bid, he said the Russians were ‘unusually loud’ in their activities, as if they did not care about who noticed what they were doing. Allegedly they wanted to undermine the American democratic process and hoped for the break-up of the European Union. Putin, Comey went on to suggest, had a distinct preference for businessmen rather than career politicians to lead foreign countries. Why? Because supposedly he saw entrepreneurs as more amenable to compromise in pursuit of deals. Comey warned that Russia’s secret services were likely to repeat their operations in forthcoming US elections.13 There were strident demands in the US Congress for questions to be answered about the Trump–Putin connection, and under the Justice Department’s aegis a special counsel investigation was announced in May 2017, to be headed by Robert Mueller, who had led the FBI until four years previously.
Comey made general remarks while omitting factual details; he was asking people to take his testimony on trust. He also mortified the president by continuing the FBI’s inquiry into the links between Trump’s electoral campaign team and the Kremlin. In May 2017 Trump’s patience ran out and he fired Comey, tweeting that he was a ‘showboat’ and ‘nut job’, and fuelling the suspicion of collusion between Trump and the Russian authorities in 2016.
Putin grew fractious. He continued to argue for an agreed global protocol on cyber-warfare, stressing that he had submitted a draft proposal to the United States in autumn 2015 and claiming the Americans had not deigned to reply.14 For years the Russian authorities had been accused of organizing the hacking of American email addresses and planting false news stories on America-based blogs, so Russia’s draft protocol was an attempt to occupy the moral high ground. Its counter-case against Washington was that it is the Americans who have most aggressively interfered in foreign electoral campaigns, both by funding rallies and secretly subsidizing the Opposition. Putin drew attention again to the visit by Victoria Nuland to Kyiv in December 2013, when she openly supported the campaign against Ukrainian President Yanukovych.15 While the American political establishment persisted with its accusations of interference, Putin decided to ask questions about America’s own interfering.
On 23 May 2017 John Brennan, Obama’s last CIA director, told the House Intelligence Committee that worries about Russian efforts to influence the result of the 2016 presidential election had led to a joint effort of the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI to investigate the scale of interference. Congressional leaders were briefed in August and Brennan himself contacted Alexander Bortnikov at the FSB to warn him off. When Bortnikov denied the charge, Brennan told him to tell Putin personally that further interference would have adverse consequences.
On 12 June 2017 the Senate voted by 98–2 to strengthen the sanctions regime against Russia, particularly to undermine international projects of American companies that involved Russian energy corporations. This would immediately disrupt agreements with Azerbaijan because of Lukoil’s operation in its territories, and also jeopardize the Southern Corridor venture to supply Caspian gas to reach Europe without passing through Russia – not the result that US senators had in mind, but a sign of the strong will to maximize damage to Russian economic progress at any price short of direct armed conflict. Oil exports from Kazakhstan would also be affected. ‘I think Russia is a global menace led by a man who is menacing,’ said Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House. ‘Vladimir Putin does not share our interests, he frustrates our interests . . . There’s no secret here – Russia tried to meddle in our elections. This is why I’m a fan of sanctions. This is why I’m a Russia hawk and a Russia sceptic.’16 Unity prevailed between Republicans and Democrats on the arguments for sanctions against Iran and North Korea as well as Russia.
The sanctions were cobbled together without consulting America’s European allies. Making no pretence of altruism, senators stressed that further action against the Russians should give priority to ‘the export of United States energy resources to create American jobs’. In Germany, France and Italy there was growing annoyance. Angela Merkel and her European partners could hardly endorse a policy that involved economic pain for Europe in the interest of America’s employment statistics.17 German commercial interests had already suffered significantly from Merkel’s original decision in 2014 to join in the American-led sanctions. President Trump did nothing to alleviate Germany’s anxiety by suggesting that the Germans could help themselves by purchasing American stocks of liquefied natural gas instead. If this was an attempt at diplomacy, it fell at the first fence and disconcerted Moscow at the same time as annoying Berlin.
The new sanctions also targeted any company contributing to the maintenance or upgrading of pipelines used for Russian hydrocarbon exports, which included the project known as Nord Stream 2 to carry natural gas from Russia under the Black Sea directly to Germany without passing through Ukraine or Poland. Though Gazprom was the chief owner of the project, European firms had substantial stakes. No American investment was involved. President Donald Tusk of the European Council, a former prime minister of Poland, was one of Nord Stream 2’s critics: as a Pole he was not enamoured of any sign of an exclusive Russo-German embrace. But other European politicians, notably Jean-Claude Juncker as President of the European Commission, were more intent on resisting American pressures. Juncker objected to what he saw as Trump’s national selfishness, and after Trump had talked of introducing tariffs on steel imports, immediately ‘threatened’ the United States with commercial retaliation if European interests were harmed. Juncker suggested the European Union should consider blocking imports of American whiskey.18
Speaking to Le Figaro newspaper in Paris on 29 May 2017, Putin said Russia was ready to bide its time and see how the Trump administration’s policy would develop, noting that in American public affairs it was possible for a defeated candidate to continue to exert influence. (He didn’t mention Hillary Clinton by name.) When asked whether in a perfect world he would expect relations with America to improve, he exploited the opportunity to purr that ‘There is no such thing as a perfect world, and there is no subjunctive mood in politics.’ He went on to criticize the continuing rise in American military expenditure, already larger than the total expenditure of the rest of the world. He also complained about NATO’s eastward expansion and America’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.19 Putin regularly took the political attack to the Americans, exclaiming to NBC’s Megyn Kelly in June 2017, ‘Point your finger to any spot on the world’s map: everywhere you’ll hear complaints that American officials interfere in their political domestic processes.’20
At last Trump met Putin for the first time, on 8 July 2017 at the G20 summit in Hamburg. Trump as usual made an inconsistent impression. The day before, he had visited the Polish city of Gdansk, where he delivered a rousing speech in which he warned Russia against its unwarranted intervention in Ukraine, and recalled the illustrious record of Solidarity in standing up to Soviet communism. The Poles greeted this with applause. They were also pleased with his endorsement of the principle of mutual military assistance embedded in NATO’S founding charter.
It came as a shock the next day in Germany, therefore, when Trump declared it an honour to make the acquaintance of Vladimir Putin: the same Putin who had annexed Ukrainian territory and excoriated NATO. Their conversation lasted much longer than scheduled, even though Melania Trump entered the room to alert her husband to the meetings he was about to miss. Trump was sitting with Secretary of State Tillerson, Putin with Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov; no one else was in the room except for their interpreters. Tillerson had earlier implied that he expected an open agenda, to take shape as the conversation proceeded, which seemed a desultory way of planning. One positive result which pleased both presidents was a verbal agreement to stabilize the situation in south-west Syria. They also came to an understanding about counterterrorist operations. According to Tillerson, Trump brought up the allegations of Russian interference in the American electoral process, but when Putin rejected the charge, Trump recoiled and focused merely on securing agreement that no such interference would occur in the future.21
If Ukraine was a bone of contention, neither spoke about it afterwards. It was as if Trump assumed he had done enough with his speech in Poland. Small wonder that the Russian media, and not just the Putin-friendly TV channels, interpreted the encounter as Putin’s triumph. Putin himself did not crow at his press conference, but instead emphasized how he and Trump had agreed to set up a working group to resolve contentious questions. Cyberspace was a burning topic, and the two of them had concurred on the desirability of a framework of mutual non-interference. Asked about Trump personally, he said:
As regards personal relations, I think that they’ve been established. I don’t know how this sounds but I’ll tell you how I see it. The ‘TV’ Trump contrasts sharply with the real person. He’s a down-to-earth person who absolutely, absolutely competently considers who he’s talking to, quickly enough makes an analysis and gives his answers to the questions on the agenda or to any new factors that crop up in the course of discussion. For this reason it seems to me that if we go and construct relations on the basis of our conversation yesterday, there’s every ground for supposing that we’ll be able to restore, even if only to a partial extent, the level of interaction that we need.22
Without dropping his earlier scepticism, Putin was pleased with how he’d found Trump.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson preferred to follow the Trump-in-Poland line when on 9 July 2017 he flew from the G20 summit to Kyiv. Meeting with President Petro Poroshenko, Tillerson stipulated that Russia had to restore ‘territorial integrity’ to Ukraine before the United States would contemplate moving towards a fundamental improvement in relations with the Kremlin.23 The feeling grew that Trump’s administration was loosely organized to the point of chaos. Tillerson had been chosen for his openness to reconciliation with Russia – in 2013 he had received the Order of Friendship from Putin himself for his work for Exxon Mobil in partnership with Rosneft. But as Secretary of State Tillerson showed in Kyiv, he was no patsy for official Russia. Defence Secretary James Mattis, National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and Trump’s own Chief of Staff John Kelly were equally reluctant to indulge Putin; they became known as ‘the grown-ups in the room’, who discouraged Trump’s preferences when they seemed injurious to the interests of America and its allies.
Russian leaders were disappointed by this cooling of the political weather. Their concern grew a day later, on 10 July 2017, when Poroshenko met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and announced his country’s ambition to achieve the alliance’s membership requirements by 2020. Stoltenberg supported him, calling upon Russia to withdraw its forces from eastern Ukraine. A Ukrainian opinion poll in June 2017 indicated an immense tide of approval for Poroshenko’s policy. Membership of NATO had become a goal endorsed by 69 per cent of Ukrainians, compared with 28 per cent in 2012. Poroshenko admitted that formal entry into the alliance would take several years, but the direction of intended travel was plainer than at any previous time. The tasks ahead for Ukraine were immense, involving fundamental reforms to eliminate corruption and impose the rule of law. It was also incumbent on a candidate country to settle its international disputes in advance – hardly an easy requirement while Russian troops remained on Ukrainian soil.24
On 25 July 2017 Kurt Volker, the United States’ special envoy for efforts to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, announced that Washington was thinking about delivering lethal weaponry to the Ukrainian armed forces, though only defensive equipment was under consideration. Even so, this would involve an upgrading of American support against Russia. Volker denied it would provoke Russian retaliation: ‘First off, Russia is already in Ukraine, they are already heavily armed. There are more Russian tanks in there than [there are tanks] in western Europe.’ President Poroshenko had long been asking for Javelin anti-tank missiles, if Russian military superiority was to be countered.25
In the same month there was a stream of revelations about contacts between the Kremlin’s representatives, official or informal, and the Trump electoral campaign team. Trump’s family and associates were loath to admit to any of it, but the investigative pressure from Senate and Congress as well as from the media was relentless. Donald Trump Jr’s blurting out that he had met a Russian lawyer in summer of the previous year who offered to share damaging information about Hillary Clinton created a considerable controversy. That the Russian authorities interfered covertly and radically in the United States’ general electoral process was hardly disputed: now everyone wanted to know the complicity of Trump’s team and particularly Trump himself. It was becoming undeniable that Russians close to the Kremlin had interfered in domestic American politics just as they had provably done in European countries, to assist foreign politicians likely to enhance Russia’s objectives. Candidate Trump was the American public figure who had come to fit this profile exactly.
Gradually President Trump was compelled to face up to the need for further precautions against military encroachment by Russia. He endorsed NATO’s deployment of troops in Poland and the Baltic States without demur. When Vice-President Mike Pence visited Estonia in July 2017, he pledged unwavering American support; when he went on to Georgia, he castigated Russia for keeping forces in South Ossetia, which in international law remained Georgian territory. On 2 August 2017 Trump bowed to the inevitable, without much grace, and signed the Senate bill to reinforce American economic sanctions against Russia. In all but name, the United States was now engaged in an all-out trade war. On 24 August 2017 US and UK troops paraded in Kyiv in celebration of Ukraine’s Independence Day. It was a signal of America’s resolve to support the anti-Russian cause.
Strategic talks between Russia and America about their nuclear forces and about conventional arms in Europe stopped under Obama and have not been resumed. Instead Trump has accelerated the programme to develop new nuclear missiles; Putin was already committed to a similar objective. The ongoing mutual threats made by the United States and North Korea have served to reinforce the assumption of the world’s political leaders that possession of rockets with nuclear warheads gives any country leverage in international relations. Neither Trump nor Putin has expressed a desire to reduce his forces. In a lecture at the General Staff Academy on 23 March 2017, Lavrov said that successive reductions in nuclear weapon stocks by Russia and America have reached their limit: the goal now, he contended, should only be strategic stability.26 The implication is that Moscow and Washington should try to agree on a realistic agenda, with the vision of a ‘nuclear-free world’ expressed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachëv in the late 1980s having faded from the scene. When Putin made his annual address to the Federal Assembly on 1 March 2018, he boasted about the new nuclear weapons Russia had produced.
On 20 March 2018, just when the frost on Russo-American relations seemed unthawable, Trump picked up the phone to congratulate Putin on his re-election as president. He made no reference to the unfairness of the entire electoral process, nor did he allude to the recent Skripal affair. Trump said they talked about Syria, North Korea, Ukraine and arms control and agreed about the desirability of an early full summit.27
The Skripal poisoning had prompted additional British economic sanctions and the expulsion of several Russian intelligence officers from the London embassy. Trump was remarkably reticent about these events, but his administration supported the British position. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reinforced the American sanctions regime, citing not only Salisbury but also eastern Ukraine and Syria. Several tycoons who had flourished during Putin’s tenure of high office, including Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Alexei Miller and Suleiman Kerimov, were now refused the right to raise loans in the United States, with inevitable consequences for their financial dealings in other foreign markets. Twelve companies and seventeen senior governmental officials were also targeted. The impact was immediate. Deripaska’s Rusal corporation, the biggest producer of aluminium in Russia, quickly lost 70 per cent in the value of its shares traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange.28
The difference from the sanctions of 2014 is stark. Obama introduced his by executive order, whereas Trump wanted an understanding with Putin, not confrontation, so the Senate bill of 2017, by leapfrogging the need to consult with the White House, had the capacity to increase the injury to the Russian economy regardless of what Trump might want. Sergei Lavrov called it ‘genocide by sanctions’.29
In May 2018 the United Kingdom passed a law to punish money laundering, encouraging the British press to raise questions about the connivance of the big law and accountancy firms in easing Russian penetration of the City of London. The impact on the ‘oligarchs’ was minimal, but Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, had difficulty in procuring his normal entry visa from Russia, leading him to apply for Israeli citizenship, only to find this would still not enable him to conduct business regularly from his London base. In September his request for residence rights in a Swiss ski resort was met with refusal after a police report warned that he constituted a threat to national security. The warm welcome for Russian finance elsewhere in Europe had not come to an end, and Russian big business and its intermediaries continued to flourish in London. But while no Russian individual or company was charged with malpractice, the British parliament had at least begun the process of examining the sources of unexplained wealth.30
The Russian intention was to hit back with counter-sanctions, and a bill was drafted for the attention of the Duma. But at the last moment it was withdrawn because Putin saw he had an economic emergency on his hands. This time there would be no anti-American measures. Trump was rumoured to have told Putin his administration had no intention of intensifying its sanctions regime again, and there was talk of the two presidents visiting each other’s capitals. While there was even a smidgen of a chance of ending the spat between Washington and Moscow, Putin called off his dogs.
The long-awaited summit between Trump and Putin took place in Helsinki in July 2018. It was the most secretive summit on record. Indeed, there were no transcripts of their conversation, since they met with only their interpreters present. When they came out of the meeting, neither said much about what had passed between them. This remained the position on the American side, giving rise to suspicions that Trump had made commitments he preferred to keep quiet about, and speculation that he had conceded on Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria. The Russians wrote of the summit as a national victory. Unlike the US State Department, the Russian Ambassador to Washington, Anatoli Antonov, divulged what had passed between the two presidents. According to him, they had had productive talks on economic cooperation, Russian interference in the American election and America’s anti-missile defence system, and also discussed Syria, medium- and short-range missiles reduction, nuclear arms non-proliferation, the Iranian nuclear arms deal and Russian gas transit across Ukraine.31
Antonov had avoided saying exactly what Putin and Trump had agreed: only what they had talked about. Trump in his tweets on 19 July was elated without being any more informative: ‘The summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media . . . There are many answers,’ he added, ‘some easy and some hard, to these problems . . . but they can all be solved!’ This did not satisfy Congress, which considered summoning Trump’s interpreter to reveal the content of the discussion.
No further summit took place in 2018, and Putin’s visit to Washington was postponed: Trump could not ignore public opinion. Nevertheless he did other things that pleased the Kremlin, particularly when in December he revealed his plan to pull out American forces from Syria and Afghanistan. Russia’s leadership was also delighted by the worsening relations between America and China after Trump introduced trade tariffs in March to put pressure on the Chinese to lower their own tariffs and protect intellectual property rights. Though Putin could take comfort from signs of a weakening of America’s global power, the American sanctions still caused difficulties. Elections to the House of Representatives in November 2018 gave a majority to the Democratic Party, and disappointed Trump’s hopes of closing down the Mueller inquiry into the Trump team’s Russian links. Campaign manager Paul Manafort, lawyer Michael Cohen and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn were all found guilty of malpractice, and the cloud of suspicion thickened over Trump’s claim to have received no assistance from the Russian authorities. Allegations of Trump’s collusion with Putin in 2016 persisted, and the Democrats in Congress were not alone in suspecting that Putin had some kind of hold over Trump. Russo-American ties had never been more contentious.
Trump stuck to his own line in foreign policy, and there were changes to his administration. In March 2018 Rex Tillerson gave way to Mike Pompeo at the State Department, and John Bolton took the place of H. R. McMaster as National Security Advisor; in December James Mattis resigned from the Defense Department and John Kelly stepped down as Presidential Chief of Staff. But the newcomers were not Trump’s yes-men – Bolton in particular had spent decades holding Russian leaders’ feet to the fire. Not all the news, however, was bad for the Kremlin. In January 2019, the decision was taken to lift the sanctions against Rusal and other of Oleg Deripaska’s companies.32 This resulted from lobbying by Deripaska as well as from the disquiet of American industrial enterprises that had suffered from the fall-off in aluminium imports. The Trump administration, moreover, followed Russia in seeking talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan.33 Trump repeated his wish to withdraw America’s forces from Iraq and to shun ‘foolish wars’.34
In March 2019 Trump received the glad news that the Mueller investigation had concluded with a recommendation for there to be no new indictments for collusion with the Russian authorities during the American presidential election three years earlier. The US president was cock-a-hoop, accusing his many accusers of having conducted a witch hunt against him.35
Although there could be no complacency in the Kremlin, Putin had reasons for cheer. In his address to the Federal Assembly in February 2019 he took pride in the national record. He noted that the government had paid off foreign debts so as to be able to cover the remainder from its own reserves if the need were to arise. He announced that the National Well-Being Fund had been able to make a substantial contribution to the state budget in the previous year. He warned that if short- or medium-range nuclear missiles were to be reinstalled on the European continent, Russians would bring back their own.36 Without naming the Americans as the main enemy or rival, he made his message clear that Russia could face up to any challenge. And he continued to offer challenges of his own. In March 2019 a small Russian military contingent was flown to Venezuela to assist the tottering Maduro government. Maduro and Trump had for years engaged in mutual recriminations, and Putin’s move was a signal to the United States that Russia had the capacity to meddle in the Americas just as the United States had done in Ukraine.
Trump called on Russia to withdraw its troops. The Russian authorities took delight in telling America to stay out of Venezuela. The harmony between Trump and Putin could no longer be taken as a given. The rest of the world watched and waited.