Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Since the fall of 2016, Russia has come to dominate the US news in a way that never happened during or after the Cold War, because of its role in the presidential campaign. Russia has become part of an increasingly bitter and contested domestic political polarization. If Vladimir Putin wanted the United States to pay more attention to Russia and to be certain that Russia featured prominently in the headlines every morning, then this was surely a success. Yet there also has been a cost for the Kremlin. By actively exploiting divisions within American society and having its activities revealed, the Kremlin has ensured that its longer-term goal of having the US remove sanctions and return to a less confrontational relationship so far has been thwarted.

Why did the Russians interfere in the US election and who was behind it? These questions have in many ways defined the US-Russia relationship since 2016 and have made it challenging to move the relationship forward since Donald Trump’s election. Russia’s ongoing interference has turned the US-Russia relationship if not into a new Cold War then into a new kind of “frozen conflict” on a grand scale. It will be very difficult to unfreeze.

Both presidential candidates were well known to the Kremlin. Putin had not hidden his hostility to Hillary Clinton, whom he blamed for the 2011 protests in Moscow—and indirectly for interfering in Russia’s 2012 election. As he told Oliver Stone in answer to a question about US interference in Russia’s elections: “In 2000 and 2012, there has always been some interference. But in 2012, this interference was particularly aggressive.” 7Clinton, in turn, had become increasingly vocal in her criticism of Russian domestic and foreign policy—and of Putin himself. Commenting on Russia’s annexation of Crimea, she said, “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s.” 8Had she been elected, the Kremlin decided, the relationship with the United States would not improve. But she was a predictable antagonist, and they were prepared to deal with her.

Donald Trump was, however, altogether another matter. It was notable that throughout the election campaign he never uttered a negative word about Vladimir Putin, in contrast to many other world leaders—allies and adversaries alike—whom he criticized liberally. Vladimir Putin returned the compliment. In one press conference, he used the Russian word yarkii to describe Trump. 9Some US media translated that into “brilliant,” but its real meaning is “vivid” or “bright.” Nevertheless, candidate Trump complimented Putin for calling him “brilliant.”

Although Trump and Putin had never met, Trump was well known in some Russian business circles. He had made his first trip to Moscow as a real estate magnate in 1987, when Gorbachev was hoping to open up the Soviet economy to Western investors. (At this point Putin was working in a second-tier KGB outpost in Dresden.) Hoping to build a luxury hotel in Moscow, Trump toured the town, describing his trip as an “extraordinary experience.” Nevertheless, although he looked at several sites for potential hotels near Red Square, nothing came of these attempts to conclude a deal in the USSR. 10When Gorbachev visited New York shortly thereafter, Trump tried to meet with him, but Gorbachev’s American hosts vetoed that plan. 11For the next twenty years Trump continued to go to Russia and work with Aras Agalarov, an Azeri-Russian oligarch. In 2007, the teetotaler Trump launched Trump vodka at Agalarov’s annual Millionaire Fair in Moscow. But Trump vodka found few drinkers in Russia.

Although he never succeeded in opening a hotel in Russia, he was back in Moscow in November 2013. He organized the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned, in Moscow, working with Agalarov. 12This was just prior to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, when Putin was under increasing criticism for his domestic clampdown. Prior to the contest, Trump had tweeted, “Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?” 13The meeting never took place, but Trump continued to speak about both Russia and its president in positive terms as US-Russia relations deteriorated in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. 14In 2016, Agalarov’s pop musician son Emin would become known to the US public for his role in arranging a meeting between his father’s lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Trump’s son and son-in-law in Trump Tower.

During the 2016 election campaign, the contrast between what candidate Clinton said about Russia and what candidate Trump said was striking. The Obama administration began to harden its policies toward Russia as the campaign progressed, going as far as having a senior Treasury official say publicly that Putin was personally corrupt—a charge the latter’s spokesman described as “fiction.” 15The Pentagon, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, named Russia as the number one national security threat. But Trump would have none of it, criticizing both the Obama administration and his rival for their position on Russia during the primary season, claiming that he would be a much better negotiator with Putin: “You want to make a good deal for the country, you want to deal with Russia—and there’s nothing wrong with not fighting everybody, having Russia where we have a good relationship as opposed to all the stupidity that’s taken place.” 16He reiterated that Putin was a “strong leader.” And in his first major foreign policy speech in April 2016, speaking of Russia, he said, “Common sense says that this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.” 17He also downplayed Russia’s actions in Ukraine. His campaign manager, Paul Manafort—who had very close ties to ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych—succeeded in having references to assisting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia removed from the Republican Party platform. As the November election approached, Trump’s message was clear: he wanted to improve ties with Russia and make a “deal” with President Putin. The details of that deal were never specified, but they appeared to include lifting the sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea and the launch of a war in the Donbas region, and possibly agreeing with Putin that Ukraine should remain neutral and within the Russian sphere of influence. It was unclear what the United States would gain in this “deal.”

While Trump was running for election, his family and campaign staff—it subsequently emerged—were cultivating their own ties with a variety of Russians with two goals in mind: to arrange a back channel with Russian officials to discuss how US-Russia ties would evolve after the election and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, which their Russian interlocutors claimed to have. It appears, in retrospect, that both the Russian and US operatives were inflating their ability to deliver what they promised, and an examination of the details of these various schemes reads like a second-rate detective novel, involving characters such as a mysterious Maltese professor who directed a defunct diplomatic academy in London and claimed to have ties to the Kremlin. But the incident that came to dominate the subsequent investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia occurred in June 2016, when Emin Agalarov’s rumpled British public relations representative sent an e-mail to Donald Trump Jr., who was a frequent visitor to Moscow. He wrote that a senior Russian official “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” 18Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say, I love it.” 19

The meeting took place in Trump Tower in New York. Participants included Donald Trump Jr.; his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner; Paul Manafort; and several Russians, the most prominent of whom was Natalia Veselnitskaya, a former prosecutor, now a lawyer in private practice. One of her clients was on the Magnitsky Act list and barred from entering the United States or doing business there. Her apparent goal was to advocate that he be removed from the list should Trump be elected, clearly not understanding that it was the US Congress, not the White House, that determines these issues. Trump Jr. would later say that they discussed adoption, a reference to the fact that the Russians retaliated for the Magnitsky Act by barring Americans from adopting Russian children. It is unclear what, if any, derogatory information on Hillary Clinton the Russians were able to provide. They appear to have had information about a Clinton donor, but not about Clinton herself. The meeting and other contacts were apparently part of a broader effort by the Trump campaign to prepare the ground for an improvement in US-Russia relations in 2017—and possibly for a renewed attempt by the Trump organization to open hotels in Russia were Trump to lose the election. During the 2016 election campaign, the Trump organization was still negotiating a possible real estate deal in Russia. Indeed, Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about how far into 2016 these negotiations continued.