A long overdue summit between the Presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation to discuss peace in Ukraine, where nuclear war has been threatened, must be seen as an historic moment for optimism.
Except that from London to Langley, Berlin, Canberra and Tokyo, intelligence chiefs will be on tenterhooks wondering if this is another occasion that looks like the meeting between an agent and his handler.
There’s no evidence that Donald Trump works for Vladimir Putin. But there is ample evidence that the US president favours Putin’s agenda. And that he has done all he can to hobble Ukraine while it defends itself against a Russian invasion of Europe’s eastern flank.
The summit was announced, significantly, by the Kremlin first. It may be held in the United Arab Emirates, which has been pursuing a “friends with all, enemies of none” foreign policy. That would be apt; a summit held in a mostly benign authoritarian state between a malevolent leader of a brutal authoritarian state and his greatest admirer, who happens to lead the world’s most powerful democracy.
Trump has done some performative pouting and sounded peevish about Putin recently. He has been humiliated by the Russian president’s indifference to his pleas to agree a ceasefire in Ukraine.
This has provoked the leader of the free world to accuse its most dangerous challenger of “bulls***” and to threaten largely toothless sanctions against the Kremlin.
Earlier this year Trump. took a very different tone with Ukraine – a pro-western democracy on track to joining the European Union and hoping to become part of Nato.
Trump cut weapons supplies to Kyiv. He blinded the US intelligence feed to Ukraine during the Russian counter-offensive to retake territory in Kursk. He publicly insulted Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accusing him of risking World War III. He held Zelensky’s feet to the fire to get a colonial-style mineral deal to pay for weapons that had been free. Trump also took Russia’s side in every aspect of how he thought Ukraine should capitulate to Moscow in future peace talks.
Putin is obsessed with returning Ukraine to the former Russian (or Soviet) empire. He has never hidden his ambition to do so and consistently denies that Ukraine is really an independent entity at all.
He is also a former KBG agent, an expert at manipulation, who genuinely believes that “the west” is plotting against Moscow, whatever ideology dominates the Kremlin. He ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 US elections, to undermine the very notion of truth in the western media, and has been delighted by Brexit as it weakens the perceived threat of the EU.
In the US, Trump has further empowered Russia by his assault on the independence of the judiciary, his flouting of democratic conventions, the enrichment of his family through his presidency and the widespread spectacle of ICE arrests by masked police. A weakened American democracy in crisis is a victory for Putin – and it’s been delivered by Trump.
As The Independent has reported before, the Five Eyes intelligence network that links the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is under strain because the agencies using the network do not trust Trump with their secrets – he has a record of blurting them out and of storing confidential material in his toilet.
When he met Putin for his first summit in Helsinki in July 2018 he did so for more than two hours with only a US translator in the room with him and the Russian delegation. He snatched away the translator’s notes after the meeting.
Then, when asked if he agreed with US intelligence assessments that Russia has interfered with the US elections he said “no”.
“President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he insisted.
The remark was condemned by Republican grandees from then US House speaker Paul Ryan and senator John McCain, among many others.
“No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” McCain said after the Helsinki summit.
Most of Trump’s face-to-face meetings with Putin have not been properly recorded and have often been held without the usual presence of White House aids and officials.
And every time they meet, Trump has emerged apparently dazzled and fulsome in his praise for the leader of a regime that kills its political opponents in jail, tosses critics off balconies and uses nerve gas and radioactive poisons to bump off defectors to Britain.
There is every chance that Trump will continue to take Russia’s side against Ukraine in a summit with Putin. The bilateral sanctions he’s threatened will make no difference to Russia, which now has negligible trade with the US. His “tertiary” sanctions against India, which has been hit with a 25 per cent surge in tariffs because it imports Russian oil, are unlikely to be imposed or if they are they will be short lived. Trump needs India inside his tent.
Trump has not threatened to renew arms shipments to Ukraine. He has not said he might reconsider the Nato/Ukraine request for American troops to help guarantee a future peace deal. He’s granted tiny exports of enough Patriot air defence missile for Kyiv for about one night’s Russian bombardment.
Trump has caused turmoil in Nato more widely. The leaders of the alliance no longer see the US as a reliable ally – let alone the cornerstone of a military construct that has protected western democracy for six decades.
Trump’s relationship with Putin has been toxic for the West, for Europe and is stripping the branches of democracy like Agent Orange.
