Behind Trump’s Views on Ukraine: Putin’s Gambit and a Political Grudge

The roots of Donald Trump’s animus toward Ukraine — an issue with profound consequences should he be elected again — can be found in a yearlong series of events spanning 2016 and 2017.

On July 7, 2017, after President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shook hands in Hamburg, Germany, to conclude their first face-to-face meeting, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson walked out of the sterile conference room, removed notes from his pocket and gave anxious White House aides a summary.

“We’ve got work to do to change the president’s mind on Ukraine,” Mr. Tillerson said.

The secretary of state had just watched Mr. Putin, the former K.G.B. spymaster, put on a master class in seeking to shape the thinking of the new American president.

The Russian leader disparaged Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with aspirations of joining the European Union and NATO. Ukraine, he told Mr. Trump, was a corrupt, fabricated country. Russia, which had seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine three years earlier and backed pro-Russia separatists in a border region, had every right to exert its influence over the country, he insisted.

Mr. Trump told Mr. Putin that his administration was considering giving weapons to Ukraine. “What do you think?” Mr. Trump asked, to which Mr. Putin said it would be “a mistake.” Whatever America gave the Ukrainians, he said, they would ask for more.

Mr. Trump, who came to the meeting armed with hawkish talking points drawn up by his advisers, never pushed back, according to three American officials who were in Hamburg for the summit.

The meeting is something of a historical footnote to the Trump presidency. It has long been overshadowed by the summit with Mr. Putin the next year in Helsinki, when Mr. Trump famously said he took the word of Mr. Putin over his own intelligence agencies on the question of whether Russia had interfered with the 2016 presidential election.

Yet a close examination of the Hamburg summit, and the months that led up to it, help explain the roots of Mr. Trump’s often-disdainful attitude toward Ukraine.

The meeting in Hamburg fit into a yearlong pattern in which an escalating political grudge against Ukraine on Mr. Trump’s part became an opening for Mr. Putin to pursue his own aim of tempering American support for Kyiv, according to interviews with American and European officials and allies of Mr. Trump, as well as accounts in memoirs.

That animus toward Ukraine remains front and center in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign. Mr. Trump has left unclear whether, if elected, he would cut off or reduce American military and diplomatic support for Ukraine as it battles the Russian invasion, at a time when he has pushed the Republican Party toward his vision of a less interventionist foreign policy open to dealing with authoritarian leaders like Mr. Putin.

The views that Mr. Trump was developing in 2016 and 2017 could, if he returns to the White House, shape policies with profound consequences for the stability of Europe, the future of NATO and America’s relations with Russia.

Mr. Trump came into office with suspicions that officials in Ukraine not so secretly favored Democrats. Then, during their initial contacts, Mr. Putin worked to cement in Mr. Trump’s head the idea that Ukraine was less a feisty young democracy eager for deeper ties to the West than an unruly Russian-speaking neighbor run by shadowy oligarchs and corrupt officials who had sought to help elect Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Trump’s dim view of Ukraine did not initially lead to any fundamental change in American policy, as establishment aides and advisers steered a reluctant Mr. Trump toward a relatively hawkish stance on Russia.

But those suspicions would surface in the events that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, triggered by a 2019 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, then Ukraine’s newly elected president. During the call, Mr. Trump implied that American military support to Ukraine was conditioned on whether Mr. Zelensky helped investigate his political rivals.

Mr. Trump’s skepticism about Ukraine and his suspicions that the country’s leaders favor Democrats continue to play out in the current presidential campaign. During his debate last month with Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump sidestepped a direct question about whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war.

Last week, he accused Mr. Zelensky of using his recent trip to the United States to bolster Ms. Harris’s campaign through an appearance at a munitions factory in Pennsylvania, a key electoral battleground state, with Gov. Josh Shapiro and Senator Bob Casey, both Democrats.

“I think Zelensky is the greatest salesman in history,” Mr. Trump said at a Pennsylvania rally the day after Mr. Zelensky’s visit to the state, referring to the Biden administration’s continued support of Ukraine. “Every time he comes into the country, he walks away with $60 billion.”

Putting a new emphasis on his longstanding belief that Ukrainian leaders favor Democrats, Mr. Trump added, “He wants them to win this election so badly.”

While Mr. Trump’s foreign policy team during his presidency included Russia hawks, it is not clear that he would populate a second administration with aides and advisers who would check his overtures to Moscow and his suspicions about Ukraine.

Mr. Putin continues to seek advantage in American politics. Senior intelligence officials briefed members of Congress last month that Russia remains determined to sow chaos in America’s elections process and erode faith in its democratic systems, and that spy agencies have specific intelligence that the Kremlin wants Mr. Trump back in the White House.

In response to questions about the development of Mr. Trump’s views, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, replied only that “weakness” on the part of President Biden and Ms. Harris was to blame for Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“President Trump will restore world peace through American strength and ensure European nations carry their weight by paying their fair share to our mutual defense to lighten the unfair burden on American taxpayers,” she said in an emailed statement.

A Dark Portrait Emerges

In August 2016, less than three months before Mr. Trump’s stunning election win, his campaign took a body blow.

Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman, resigned days after news broke about an investigation by a Ukrainian government agency into handwritten ledgers purporting to show millions in undisclosed cash payments to Mr. Manafort from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine, where he had worked as a consultant.

Weeks earlier, Mr. Trump had publicly appealed to Moscow for help in his campaign against Mrs. Clinton, encouraging Russia to leak damaging emails about his opponent that Russian government hackers had stolen from the Democratic National Committee.

But the disclosure of the investigation into the ledgers was seen among Trump allies as evidence that the Ukrainian officials were in cahoots with the Democrats to sully the Trump campaign’s reputation.

Mr. Manafort would later say that the allegations about cash payments appeared to be deliberate and premeditated, writing in his memoir that he believed “there was something larger and more sinister going on.”

According to the 2019 investigation by the Republican-majority Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Manafort and other Trump campaign officials began to advance the theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had carried out the hack.

The report said that Mr. Manafort “parroted a narrative” expressed by Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national who worked for Mr. Manafort in Ukraine and whom the report called a “Russian intelligence officer.” Mr. Kilimnik has denied working for Russian spy services.

By that point in the campaign, Mr. Trump had spoken in public on occasion about Ukraine’s simmering conflict with Russia. Usually it was to question the wisdom of sending money and arms to a country that he saw as being of little strategic importance to the United States when powerful European countries like Germany refused, or were reluctant to do so, for fear of antagonizing Moscow.

But, within Mr. Trump’s circle, a darker portrait of Ukraine began to emerge, one of a country filled with Mr. Trump’s political enemies.

An impromptu conversation Mr. Trump had at a fund-raising dinner late in the 2016 campaign seemed to reinforce this view with the future president. In October of that year, a Trump campaign donor named Robert Pereira hosted the candidate at his oceanside mansion in Hillsboro Beach, Fla., a home designed in the image of Versailles Palace in France.

Among those in attendance was Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born American who would go on to help Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani try to find damaging information about Hunter Biden in Ukraine and then turn against Mr. Trump.

In that conversation and others that followed, Mr. Parnas said he described Ukraine as a place where corruption was a “way of life” and where the financier George Soros, the liberal billionaire who is seen as a boogeyman in Republican circles, spread money to bolster the Democratic Party’s influence.

“Absolutely, I spoke to him about that, and about the way that the Democrats were the corrupt ones,” Mr. Parnas said in an interview. He acknowledged that he was telling Mr. Trump what he thought “he wanted to hear.”

H.R. McMaster, the former White House national security adviser, wrote in his recent memoir that during the president’s June 2017 meeting with Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at the time, Mr. Trump said bluntly he had heard from “a Ukrainian friend” that Ukraine was a corrupt country, and that the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, was actually part of Russia.

Mr. Parnas said he believes that was a reference to him. “I’m the only Ukrainian American friend he had at the time,” he said.

Putin Stokes the Fire

As he prepared to take office, all of these events, and subsequent findings by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had intervened to help get Mr. Trump elected, were seen by the thin-skinned president-elect as an attempt to sow doubt about the legitimacy of his victory. And they created fertile ground for Mr. Putin to exploit when he and Mr. Trump spoke by phone on Jan. 28, 2017, their first call of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

According to a former senior U.S. official with direct knowledge of what took place during the call, it was Mr. Trump who first raised the issue of Ukraine, asking Mr. Putin to give his opinion about the country because he had heard differing views.

The Russian president seized the opening. He launched into an extended monologue about corruption in Ukraine. Mr. Trump was guarded in his response, neither agreeing with Mr. Putin nor defending Ukraine, but he acknowledged that Russia’s dispute with Ukraine was an obstacle to his goal of improving relations with Moscow.

That same day, Mr. Trump got a different perspective on Ukraine from Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, but had little patience for what he saw as Ms. Merkel’s lecturing.

During a phone call, Ms. Merkel walked the American president through the history of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship. She discussed what American and European nations did to support Ukraine during the Obama administration, how it was essential for the support to continue and how Russian aggression in Ukraine needed to be blunted or risk further destabilization in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Trump shut down the discussion.

“Thank you very much, and goodbye” was Mr. Trump’s response, according to one person who listened to the call.

At the time, the F.B.I. was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and contacts between Mr. Trump’s advisers and individuals connected to the Kremlin. In response, some of Mr. Trump’s allies began circulating a baseless theory that the Democratic National Committee’s hacked computer server was actually in Ukraine and that the F.B.I. was never able to examine it.

Mr. Putin stoked the fire, publicly asserting that Ukraine had tried to assist Mrs. Clinton.

During a February 2017 news conference with Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, Mr. Putin said that the “Ukrainian government adopted a unilateral position in favor of one candidate” in the American election.

“Certain oligarchs, certainly with the approval of the political leadership, funded this candidate, or female candidate, to be more precise,” he said. “Now, they need to improve relations with the current administration.”

Soon, Mr. Trump began promoting the conspiracy theory about a link between the D.N.C. server and Ukraine, including in an April 2017 interview with The Washington Examiner. “Somebody had mentioned, and this may be incorrect, a company that’s owned by somebody from the Ukraine,” he said. “You’ve heard that, I assume you’ve heard that?”

During a May 2017 meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, Mr. Trump turned the conversation to the subject of Ukraine. According to the former senior U.S. official with direct knowledge of what took place during the meeting, Mr. Trump started “ruminating” about what he perceived as a connection between Ukraine and Mrs. Clinton, and peppered Mr. Lavrov with questions about ties between Ukrainian officials and Democrats.

As Mr. Trump’s resentment toward Ukraine began to build, some of his advisers tried unsuccessfully to convince him that conspiracy theories about Ukrainian election sabotage were baseless.

Thomas P. Bossert, the White House homeland security adviser, said he had “lengthy conversations with the president” to brief Mr. Trump on all the intelligence collected by American spy agencies showing it was Russia, not Ukraine, that meddled in the 2016 election.

“I refuted the notions that the servers were in Ukraine to Trump, and I reaffirmed the intelligence community’s conclusion that it was Russia and not Ukraine with evidence, with intelligence community evidence, voluminous evidence,” Mr. Bossert said in an interview.

There is little evidence that Mr. Trump listened.

A ‘K.G.B. Shtick’

Mr. McMaster and Mr. Bossert prepared Mr. Trump for the Hamburg meeting with Mr. Putin. The tough stance they supported toward Moscow was evident in a speech Mr. Trump gave the day before the summit. On July 6, 2017, Mr. Trump stood before a jubilant crowd assembled at Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, and sent a stern message to Mr. Putin: Stay out of Ukraine.

Russia, Mr. Trump said in a line included in the speech at Mr. McMaster’s insistence, should “cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine” and join “responsible nations in our fight against common enemies.”

But the next day in Hamburg, sitting across from Mr. Putin, the American president listened as Mr. Putin delivered a monologue. Mr. McMaster wrote in his book that Mr. Putin “used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him.”

Beyond his usual points about Ukrainian corruption, Mr. Putin made an argument that he had a duty to protect Russian speakers in the eastern part of the country, along the border with Russia, from “ethnic cleansing.”

Mr. Putin even brought up an episode from American history to defend Russian military operations. Just as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, advanced by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, justified American intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, he said, so was Russia justified in operating inside Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking citizens there.

Fiona Hill, a senior member of Mr. Trump’s National Security Council staff who was in Hamburg for the summit, said she believed that Mr. Putin most likely referred to Roosevelt in the meeting “because he did his homework” and knew that Mr. Trump had a fixation on the former “strongman” president.

When Mr. Tillerson huddled after the meeting with several of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Mr. McMaster and Ms. Hill, Mr. Tillerson said that the Russian president had done his “K.G.B. shtick” on Mr. Trump, Ms. Hill recounted. Mr. Tillerson, she said, stressed that they all had work to do to counter Mr. Putin’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric.

“Putin was basically telling him that you can’t trust Ukraine, and don’t give them anything,” Ms. Hill recalled about Mr. Tillerson’s briefing.

‘The Antibodies Kicked In’

And yet if Mr. Putin’s goal during the Hamburg meeting was to turn American foreign policy squarely against Ukraine, his strategy had the opposite effect, leading Mr. Trump’s national security team to become more assertive about countering Moscow.

As one former American official put it, “The antibodies kicked in.”

After the Hamburg meeting, one former top White House official recalled, Mr. Putin ended his direct approach, appearing to conclude that seeking to sway Mr. Trump was backfiring by provoking a strong anti-Russia response in the American foreign policy establishment.

The Kremlin would subsequently adopt a different strategy, U.S. officials said. Russia advanced its agenda in part through a network of proxies — including a Ukrainian lawmaker whom the U.S. government has identified as an “agent of the Russian intelligence services” — to stoke conflict in American politics and influence Trump loyalists like Mr. Giuliani who had the president’s ear as they sought information in Ukraine about the Biden family.

While Mr. Trump expressed an interest in improving U.S.-Russian relations, his administration took a series of overt and covert steps to penalize the Russians, and to help Ukraine’s military and intelligence services stand up to them.

One of those overt steps was a 2017 decision to provide the Ukrainian military with a limited number of Javelin antitank missiles, something the Obama administration had declined to do. At Mr. McMaster’s urging, Mr. Trump was persuaded to take that step in spite of Mr. Putin’s message in Hamburg about how doing so would be “a mistake.”

At the same time, the C.I.A. stepped up its operations against the Russians and expanded its intelligence partnerships with the Ukrainians. According to a former senior U.S. official, Mike Pompeo, Mr. Trump’s first C.I.A. director, told U.S. intelligence officers, who worked closely with the Ukrainians and other European allies, that their mission was to “crush the Russians.” (Mr. Pompeo did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

From the perspective of U.S. intelligence officers who operated against the Russians, stories in the press about Mr. Trump’s seeming embrace of Mr. Putin and interest in improving relations with the Russians provided a convenient cover for what they were doing behind the scenes to counter Moscow.

Yet Mr. Trump’s negative views of Ukraine hardened over time, creating a strange disconnect between official American policy and public statements by the commander in chief.

On the morning of July 25, 2017, weeks after his meeting with Mr. Putin, the president fired off a post on Twitter, seeking to prod his attorney general to investigate election meddling by Ukraine:

“Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign — ‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G. @seanhannity”

Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill began to echo Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about Ukraine, and most of them rallied to his defense during his first impeachment, after the 2019 phone call with Mr. Zelensky.

In effect, what Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani were asking the Ukrainians to do in the 2020 election — announce an investigation into the Bidens — was akin to what they accused the Ukrainians of doing for Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election with the announcement of the black ledger investigation.

Mr. Zelensky did not give in to the pressure.

‘It Takes Two to Tango’

During the current presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has sometimes played his usual notes, such as when he said during a July 2023 rally that Congress should refuse to authorize money for weapons to Ukraine “until the F.B.I., D.O.J. and I.R.S. hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family’s corrupt business dealings.”

Then, in April, Mr. Trump dropped his opposition to a $60 billion Ukraine aid package that had stalled in Congress. The bill passed by a wide margin.

Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that if he is elected, he will push to end the war “in one day” with a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine, citing his “very good relationship” with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Zelensky’s trip to Pennsylvania last month left Mr. Trump fuming again. So did Mr. Zelensky’s remarks in an interview in The New Yorker in which Mr. Zelensky said that Senator JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, was “too radical” and that Mr. Trump “doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.”

Mr. Trump even suggested that the blame for the widespread destruction in Ukraine caused by the Russian assault rested with the Ukrainian president. Mr. Zelensky, he said, should have cut a deal with Mr. Putin to avoid the invasion.

“Those cities are gone, they’re gone, and we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refused to make a deal,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Mint Hill, N.C., with a smattering of jeers and boos from the crowd when he mentioned Mr. Zelensky’s name.

When Mr. Zelensky sought to mend fences with a visit to Trump Tower, the former president repeated his message that if he is elected he will promptly negotiate a peace deal.

“We have a very good relationship and I also have a very good relationship with President Putin, and if we win I think we’re going to get it resolved very quickly,” Mr. Trump said with Mr. Zelensky at his side.

When Mr. Zelensky broke in to say, “I hope we’re going to have more good relations with us,” Mr. Trump said, “You know, it takes two to tango.”

Adam Goldman contributed reporting.