‘I know Vladimir Putin very well,’ said Donald Trump yesterday, speaking of the Ukraine crisis, ‘he would have never done during the Trump administration what he is doing now.’ As with a lot of Trump utterances, that statement is at once arrogant, preposterous — and probably true.
Maybe it is a coincidence — or Trump’s often-cited luck — that the last major crisis over Ukraine was back in 2014, after Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and Putin annexed Crimea. Or perhaps not.
Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognised
Back then Barack Obama led the free world and, busy as he was, he offloaded the knotty Ukraine problem on to his Vice President Joe Biden, which I wrote about here
yesterday.
In the years since, we’ve heard a lot about Russia’s further expansionist aims in the Donbas, Ukraine, and even the Nato Baltic states. But it is only now, one year into Joe Biden’s presidency, that Putin has made his first significant move since that annexation of Crimea.
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