http://archive.today/2025.04.26-092803/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/politics/trump-putin-russia-ukraine.html
If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term.
Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.
The promise of sanctions relief? Check.
Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.
Indeed, as Mr. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Friday for more negotiations, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.
The notion that Russia would get to keep the territory it has taken as part of a balanced peace deal is broadly acknowledged as inevitable. But Mr. Trump is taking it further by offering official U.S. recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014 in violation of international law, an extra step of legitimacy that stunned many in Ukraine as well as its friends in Washington and Europe.
Such a move would reverse the policy of the first Trump administration. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s State Department issued a Crimea Declaration affirming its “refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force,” likening it to the U.S. refusal to recognize Soviet control of the Baltic States for five decades.
“Crimea will stay with Russia,” he said in the interview, which was released on Friday. He again blamed Ukraine for Russia’s decision to invade it, saying that “what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO.”
But that is not all that Mr. Putin has gotten out of Mr. Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of the president’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.
Mr. Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by halting cyber offensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.
“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands,” said Ivo Daalder, the chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”
But what has been so striking about Mr. Trump’s return to office is how many of his other actions over the past three months have been seen as benefiting Russia, either directly or indirectly — so much so that Russian officials in Moscow have cheered the American president on and publicly celebrated some of his moves.
After he moved to dismantle Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, two U.S.-funded news organizations that have transmitted independent reporting to the Soviet Union and later Russia, Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian state broadcaster RT, called it “an awesome decision by Trump.” She added, “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”
Those are just a couple of the U.S. government organizations that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have targeted to the delight of Russia. Moscow has long resented the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, all of which fund democracy promotion programs that the Kremlin considers part of a campaign of regime change, and all of which now face the ax.
At the same time, Mr. Charap said that the Ukraine peace plan offered by Mr. Trump, even though tilted in Moscow’s direction, did not actually address important points that Russia insisted on including in any settlement, like barring the presence of any foreign military forces in Ukraine.
The net effect of Mr. Trump’s tilt toward Russia and dismantlement of U.S. institutions that have irritated Moscow is to undercut America’s position against a major adversary, argued David Shimer, a former Russia adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Just last month, Mr. Shimer noted, the intelligence community declared that Russia remains an “enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”
“The current approach,” Mr. Shimer said, “favors Russia across the board — making concession after concession on Ukraine, dismantling our key soft power tools and weakening our alliance network across Europe, which historically has helped the United States deal with Russian aggression from a position of strength.”
