How Trump plays into Putin’s hands, from Ukraine to slashing US institutions

Washington: If President Vladimir Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s new term.

Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.

The promise of sanctions relief? Check.

Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.

Indeed, as Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Friday for more negotiations, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.

But that is not all that Putin has gotten out of Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of Trump’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.

Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by halting cyber offensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.

He spared Russia from the tariffs that he is imposing on imports from nearly every other nation, arguing that it was already under sanctions. Yet he still applied the tariff on Ukraine, the other party he is negotiating with. And in a reversal from his first term, Politico reported that Trump’s team is reportedly discussing whether to lift sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, a project he has repeatedly condemned.

“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands,” said Ivo Daalder, CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, rejected the notion that Trump’s actions have been to Russia’s advantage. “The president only acts in the interest of the United States,” she said in an interview.

She added that there was no connection between Russia and the cuts to various organizations that have been orchestrated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, or similar efforts to pare back government.

“DOGE has nothing to do with the efforts by our national security team to end the war,” she said. “Those are not conscious decisions the president is making to appease Russia in any way. When it comes to Russia and Ukraine, he’s trying to appease the world by ending the war and bringing it to a peaceful resolution.”

Trump has long rejected criticism that he is soft on Russia, even as he has expressed admiration for Putin. He issued a rare rebuke of Putin this past week after a missile strike on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, killed at least a dozen people, demanding on social media, “Vladimir, STOP!”

Speaking with reporters later, Trump denied that he was pressuring just Ukraine for concessions. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on Russia, and Russia knows that,” he said.

Asked what Moscow would have to give up as part of a peace deal, Trump said only that Russia would not get to take over all of Ukraine — something it had not actually been able to do militarily in the three years since its full-scale invasion. “Stopping the war, stopping taking the whole country, pretty big concession,” he said.

But what has been so striking about Trump’s return to office is how many of his other actions over the past three months have been seen as benefiting Russia, either directly or indirectly — so much so that Russian officials in Moscow have cheered the US president on and publicly celebrated some of his moves.

After he moved to dismantle Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, two US-funded news organizations that have transmitted independent reporting to the Soviet Union and later Russia, Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russian state broadcaster RT, called it “an awesome decision by Trump.” She added, “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”

Those are just a couple of the US government organizations that Trump and Musk have targeted to the delight of Russia. Moscow has long resented the US Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, all of which fund democracy promotion programs that the Kremlin considers part of a campaign of regime change, and all of which now face the ax.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s new department restructuring plan likewise takes aim at offices that have aggravated Russia over the years, including the democracy and human rights bureau, which would be folded into an office for foreign assistance. Rubio said the bureau had become a “platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas” against conservative foreign leaders in places like Poland, Hungary and Brazil.

“The ultimate outcome is this is going to benefit Russia under Putin in the long term,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis. “These kinds of democracy promotion programs under multiple administrations we saw as a way to win allies and improve America’s standing in the world. By pulling back, we’re undermining that, and Russia is stepping in.”

Samuel Charap, an analyst at the Rand Corp., said that many of the actions Trump had taken were not necessarily aimed at pleasing Moscow. “I’m not sure the Russians thought of those things as things that they would want to put on the table, even in a negotiation with the U.S.,” he said, like dismantling Voice of America. “But they’re certainly happy to see it go away.”

At the same time, Charap said that the Ukraine peace plan offered by Trump, even though tilted in Moscow’s direction, did not actually address important points that Russia insisted on including in any settlement, like barring the presence of any foreign military forces in Ukraine.

“It doesn’t touch on a bunch of issues that they’ve identified as their top priorities in the negotiation about the Ukraine war,” he said, “and the concessions that are made, in some cases, might not have been their top priorities.”

Some of the targets of the Trump administration’s cuts have been resisting, and it is not clear how many of the cuts will ultimately go into effect. A federal judge this past week blocked Trump from dismantling Voice of America, pending further litigation. The Trump administration appealed Friday. The National Endowment for Democracy, aid groups and other institutions are suing as well.

But there is no such recourse for other government initiatives. Rubio this month shut down an office that tracked foreign disinformation from Russia and other adversaries, asserting that the Biden administration had tried to “censor the voices of Americans.”

The administration has shuttered a task force working to seize assets of Russian oligarchs; gutted an effort to guard against election interference by Russia and other foreign adversaries; halted cyber offensive operations against Russia; withdrawn from an international group investigating leaders responsible for the Ukraine invasion; and frozen funding for a project tracking tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russian forces. The administration also vacated a position meant to collect evidence on Russian atrocities in Ukraine, The Washington Post reported.

Moreover, Trump has welcomed into his orbit people with ties to Russia’s efforts to shape American politics. Ed Martin, his interim US attorney in Washington, appeared on RT and Sputnik, two state-run media outlets that spread Russian propaganda, more than 150 times, the Post reported.

Just this past week, the White House included in the press pool Tim Pool, a right-wing commentator who was paid $100,000 for each video that he posted to a social media site as part of what the Justice Department called a Russian influence operation. Pool has said that he did not know the money came from Russia, and he has not been accused of a crime.

Some of the Trump administration’s positions abandon long-standing Republican orthodoxy, and even in some cases stances held by Trump’s team itself. The National Endowment for Democracy was created under President Ronald Reagan. The now-vacated position on Russian atrocities was mandated by legislation co-sponsored by Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., who is now Trump’s national security adviser.

The notion that Russia would get to keep the territory it has taken as part of a balanced peace deal is broadly acknowledged as inevitable. But Trump is taking it further by offering official U.S. recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014 in violation of international law, an extra step of legitimacy that stunned many in Ukraine as well as its friends in Washington and Europe.

Such a move would reverse the policy of the first Trump administration. In 2018, Trump’s State Department issued a Crimea Declaration affirming its “refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force,” likening it to the US refusal to recognize Soviet control of the Baltic States for five decades.

In 2022, Rubio, then a Republican senator from Florida, co-sponsored legislation barring US recognition of Russian sovereignty over any captured Ukrainian territory. “The United States cannot recognize Putin’s claims, or we risk establishing a dangerous precedent for other authoritarian regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party, to imitate,” Rubio said at the time.

By contrast, Trump made clear in a new interview with Time magazine that the United States could indeed recognize Putin’s claim. In fact, he went ahead and effectively did so without even waiting for a deal to be sealed.

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” he said in the interview, which was released Friday. He again blamed Ukraine for Russia’s decision to invade it, saying that “what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO.”

The net effect of Trump’s tilt toward Russia and dismantlement of U.S. institutions that have irritated Moscow is to undercut America’s position against a major adversary, argued David Shimer, a former Russia adviser to President Joe Biden. Just last month, Shimer noted, the intelligence community declared that Russia remains an “enduring potential threat to US power, presence and global interests.”

“The current approach,” Shimer said, “favors Russia across the board — making concession after concession on Ukraine, dismantling our key soft power tools and weakening our alliance network across Europe, which historically has helped the United States deal with Russian aggression from a position of strength.”