WASHINGTON — At first glance, President Trump’s decision to relax U.S. sanctions on Russia despite its continuing invasion of Ukraine was a dramatic break from principles that guided American foreign policy for most of a century.
Since the end of World War II, U.S.-Russian relations have oscillated between hostility and friendship, but one element was consistent: When Russia tried to take over one if its neighbors, the United States pushed back.
This time, though, the United States appeared to favor the aggressor, not the victim.
“The Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of being an honest broker,” Richard N. Haass, a former senior State Department official under then-President George W. Bush, wrote last week. “It has gone all in on Russia’s side.”
The break from long-standing tradition was real, but it should not have been entirely surprising.
Trump has long expressed admiration for Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin — part of a syndrome one of his former aides, Fiona Hill, has called “autocrat envy.”
“He wants to rule like them,” she said, referring to the president’s bromances with Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and other strongmen.
Meanwhile, Trump often expresses disdain for democratically elected leaders of smaller countries, and he reserves a special loathing for the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.
He has repeatedly said Zelensky was foolish to resist Russia’s 2022 invasion because, in his view, the larger country is almost certain to win the war.
“Russia is a massive country,” he said this month. “Even if it loses a million soldiers, it still has a million more. Ukraine doesn’t have that kind of manpower.”
Moreover, Trump has long believed U.S. companies could reap an economic bonanza from Russia’s resource-rich economy. As a real estate magnate, he spent 30 years seeking deals in Moscow; in 2008, his son Donald Jr. said Russians had provided the Trump Organization “a lot of our assets.”
In the short run, the president hopes to boost Republican prospects in next week’s midterm elections by buying diesel fuel from Russia — a move aimed at lowering prices at the cost of bolstering Putin’s war economy. (It hasn’t worked; the price of diesel has risen slightly since Trump’s decision.)
But he has a longer-term goals as well. He has long believed better relations between the United States and Russia would be good for both countries, no matter who’s in power in Moscow. And he has long yearned openly for a Nobel Peace Prize — and one way might be to arrange a durable ceasefire in Ukraine.
All those factors have led Trump to overturn two major elements of traditional U.S. foreign policy.
Instead of supporting Ukraine, the victim of a foreign military invasion, he’s been pressing the Zelensky to accept Putin’s demands for territory.
“President Trump still wants a personal relationship with Putin, and he wants to change the nature of the bilateral U.S.-Russian relationship. Ukraine is in the way. So what President Trump is trying to do is get Ukraine out of the way. ... President Trump wants Zelensky to capitulate,” Hill said.
“Zelensky has to want to settle this war, and if he doesn’t, I think it’s going to be a very bad thing,” Trump said last week.
As he issued that advice, Ukraine’s army was experiencing interruptions with three forms of U.S. military help: Starlink, the communications system it uses to guide its anti-drone missiles; U.S.-provided early radar warnings of Russian missile attacks; and supplies of Patriot anti-missile weapons. U.S. officials claimed the three incidents were not deliberate — but to Ukrainians, they felt like a warning.
Meanwhile, instead of putting pressure on Putin through the traditional means of economic sanctions, Trump said he was trying to entice the Russian leader to negotiate by giving him preemptive rewards.
“I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table,” he explained on Truth Social. “Great progress is being made.”
But signs of that progress were hard to find. In St. Petersburg last week, Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, presented Putin with a ceasefire proposal that the Americans negotiated with Ukraine and European countries. A top Putin aide dismissed the document, saying it “contained little of real value.”
Instead, the Russian president offered to increase Russian fertilizer exports to U.S. farmers. And he said he hoped Trump would join him at a summit meeting in China with Xi.
Ukraine has not been invited to that meeting, which prompted Haass to resurrect an old diplomatic aphorism: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Haass and other veterans of U.S. negotiations with Russia fear that Putin is merely stalling for time and pocketing Trump’s concessions while he tries to grind Ukraine down with missile attacks on Kyiv and other cities.
“If Trump and Witkoff were serious, they would give Putin 15 days to say yes to their ceasefire proposal — and if he doesn’t, they would impose new and tougher sanctions,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “There are still a lot of things they can do that would put Russia in a corner.”
But that has not been Trump’s inclination so far.
The irony, Hill said, is that even if Trump gets his way, that may not produce the victory he appears to expect.
“Putin and Trump are not the only actors in this,” she said. “Ukraine is not anybody’s to give. Its not Putin’s to have, and it’s not Zelensky’s. ... This whole war is about Ukrainians wanting the right to determine their own future. It’s not Putin’s right or anyone else’s. It’s not Donald Trump’s to give away.”