Anne Applebaum sobre os "amores" (se essa é a palavra) de Trump por Putin:
Russia, Russia, Russia
Trump’s relationship with Moscow remains very weird
OCT 14
In the past few days, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. I summed up his new policy in the Atlantic:
He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange. He has not criticized Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants or factories, even those owned by American companies. He has offered no condolences for the recent deaths of Ukrainian children in Russian bombing raids.
He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an “energy cease-fire,” an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later. He accused Ukraine of blocking negotiations, when in reality the Ukrainians have repeatedly proposed cease-fires and Russia has never agreed to a cease-fire or any meaningful negotiation at all.
He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over, bar some territorial negotiations. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. If Trump knows this, then he does not care.
And yet…large parts of this story don’t make sense:
The president has implied that the point of his new policy is to lower fuel prices for Americans. Perhaps he wants to convince voters that the cause of high prices is Ukraine and not his own war of choice in Iran. But this is not a sufficient explanation or justification for these dramatic actions. The amount of fuel that Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes.
This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit. These include deals involving the Nord Stream gas pipelines, mineral mining in the Arctic, the Russian assets frozen in European banks, and more.
But Trump cannot make things happen simply by saying them, and he cannot make Ukraine stop fighting either. The US gives no weapons to Ukraine, except those that are purchased by Europeans. I am told that the US intelligence contribution to Ukraine is now minimal, mostly involving defensive, not offensive operations. Certainly the Ukrainians do not need American intelligence, or Starlink, to hit Russian refineries. If Elon Musk limits the range of Starlink inside Ukraine (some say he did so on Wednesday morning) he will pay a high price. European governments and other big customers will take this as a warning: Musk’s technology is unreliable because Musk is unreliable, and they should end their contracts and not sign new ones.
But if this diesel deal won’t stop the Ukrainian strikes on refineries, won’t have an impact on the election, isn’t popular among Americans, will further alienate allies and won’t stop the Ukrainians, why is Trump doing it? There can only be one answer: because Russia has been so important to him for so long.
Periodically, an interviewer or interlocutor asks me why Donald Trump is so obsessed with Russia. Why does he allow himself to be humiliated by Putin, who did not even pretend to respect his “ceasefire”? Why does he parrot Russian propaganda? I don’t really understand why anyone still poses these questions, because they were answered long ago.
I wrote about Trump’s Russian connections as long ago as July 2016, in the Washington Post. In subsequent months and years, there were multiple investigations into Trump’s business links with Russia, extending back to the 1980s. These include links to people affiliated with the Russian mafia, some of whom owned condos in his buildings; his broader reliance on Russian clients, as well as anonymous purchasers of condos, many of whom are believed to come from Russia. Famously, a Russian oligarch purchased a property from Trump for tens of millions of dollars over the previous price, at a time when Trump needed the money.
Equally well documented is Trump’s fondness for Russian propaganda narratives. Upon returning from his first trip to Moscow in 1987, he took out full-page advertisements in three newspapers, attacking American alliances in Europe and Asia:
For nearly 40 years, he has been saying much the same thing. He has changed his mind about abortion and crypto, he has supported different political parties at different times, but his dislike of America’s democratic allies and his preference for Russia have remained remarkably consistent.
The Mueller report and a subsequent bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence demonstrated multiple Russian attempts to contact Trump during the 2016 campaign and to sway the election, through the release of hacked data from the DNC as well as major investments into American social media. But because Trump succesfully mocked and minimized this story (“Russia, Russia, Russia,” he says, as if that were an argument) and because the Republican party went along with this lie, it seems as if Americans have to be constantly reminded anew: yes, Trump’s relationship with Russia is intense, longstanding, and deeply weird.
It also contradicts the views of the American military and American intelligence, as well as majorities in the country and in Congress. Immediately after his statement on diesel and his comments about Volodymyr Zelensky, a bipartisan cohort of U.S. representatives and senators attacked the deal and vowed to reverse it. On Monday, U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, America’s highest-ranking soldier in Europe and the top NATO commander—a job always held by an American—delivered a very different message to Russia.
Speaking at a security conference in Warsaw, Grynkewich said that any attack on NATO, something many now genuinely fear, would be met with overwhelming force: “We will stop the attack and deny them the ability to achieve their objectives, whatever those might be. We will, in short, ensure any attack, against any ally, proves utterly futile.” He implied that there would be massive retaliation targeting “anything and everything that supports, sustains, and controls” an aggressive force.
This is the kind of language that, if it also came from the White House, might deter Russia from expanding its current campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks in Europe, from continuing to aid Iran, or from committing war crimes in Ukraine. But this president absolutely refuses to use it, and at this point, we have to assume he never will.
