What’s really behind Trump’s deference to Putin?

Original article by Luke Harding

Could Donald Trump be a Russian asset? The headline on a review in the Guardian of my new book Betrayal has provoked heated international debate. Written by the historian Lawrence Freedman, the piece generated thousands of comments from across Europe and beyond on social media. Many people responded with a single word: “Duh!”

Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin is the biggest mystery in international politics. In 2017 I wrote a book called Collusion, which set out Moscow’s operation to support and cultivate Trump, going back decades. The US president, of course, denies links with Russia. But in his second term, his behaviour towards Putin has been as weird and perplexing as during his first.

For example, at the Alaska summit last year the US president applauded his Russian counterpart, meeting him at Anchorage airport and rolling out a red carpet. Trump seemed uncharacteristically nervous, as he waited for Putin to emerge from his plane. At their joint press conference after talks, he allowed the Russian president to speak first. It was a bizarre act of deference. Why?

There are, I think, overlapping reasons for Trump’s submissive behaviour. I explore them in Betrayal, (which is published this week in Denmark by Politikens Forlag, with Italian, Finnish and Ukrainian language editions to follow.)

As I mentioned in a Q&A with Guardian readers, one factor is ideological: Trump’s Maga supporters see Russia as an “anti-woke” kindred state. Putin leans into this idea, positioning himself as a defender of conservative values, under threat from a decadent and godless Europe. High-profile Trump supporters have travelled to Moscow. Erstwhile Maga cheerleader and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson even absurdly praised the Russian capital’s well-stocked supermarkets.

Another explanation – advanced by Fiona Hill, the former White House adviser – is strongman envy. Trump would like Putin’s freedom of action, when it comes to making money and crushing opponents. It is evident the US president prefers the company of autocrats. By contrast he frequently badmouths European democrats, among them the former British PM Keir Starmer (“no Churchill”), and Giorgia Meloni (“I felt sorry for her”.)

A third theory is kompromat, a KGB term to describe potential compromising material. We know from declassified records that the Czechoslovakia secret police began spying on Trump in the 1970s, when he married a woman from behind the iron curtain. He visited Moscow in 1987, on a trip organised by a Soviet state agency, and subsequently made many visits to Russia including in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.

What exactly happened on these excursions is unclear. But I know from my own experience in Moscow – I was the Guardian’s bureau chief from 2007 to 2011 – that Russia’s intelligence agencies are adept at surveillance operations. Shortly after I arrived, the FSB broke into the apartment I shared with my wife and our two children. They left clues, busting open the window in my son’s bedroom, with a perilous drop to the courtyard below.

The British embassy advised us our home was bugged. Possibly, Putin’s ghost-like spies had installed video cameras too, we were told. Over the next four years we experienced on-off harassment from a shadowy and paranoid state. There were mysterious break-ins, veiled threats from foreign ministry officials, and a summons to visit Lefortovo, the FSB’s infamous pre-detention centre and gloomy prison.

Undoubtedly, the KGB and FSB will have spied on Trump too, as well as on other high-profile foreign guests. A 2020 report by the US Senate intelligence committee alleged that the FSB has secret cameras inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where Trump stayed during his 2013 trip. There will be tapes. They may be innocuous. But Putin knows what they show, and Trump knows that Putin knows.

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Consequences remain the same

Does this make Trump an asset? My conclusion is that the terminology doesn’t much matter. As the chess champion Garry Kasparov notes, if Trump were an asset, or an agent of influence, what exactly would he do differently? Since 2025 he has stopped direct US military aid to Kyiv, humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, and repeated Kremlin lies and disinformation.

The US president’s Russia-friendly actions have consequences. I have been visiting Kyiv for nearly two decades, and have spent much of the past five years reporting from Ukraine and the frontline. I was in the capital in February 2022 when Putin tried to seize it. Since then, the conflict has evolved. It is no longer fought with armoured vehicles and tanks, and has become instead a hi-tech aerial battle.

Most nights, Russia bombards Kyiv with kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles. Ukraine, meanwhile, carries out its own long-range strikes. It has the world’s most innovative drone and counter-drone industry. But Kyiv badly lacks US-made Patriot interceptors – the only system capable of shooting down fast-moving ballistic missiles.

Trump refuses to send Patriots or allow Kyiv to develop its own version under licence. And so civilians die – families, elderly couples, teenagers – entombed under the ruins of pulverised apartment blocks. At night you hear explosions, a moped-like growl from enemy drones, and booms from Ukrainian air defence. Asset or not, Trump is doing little to make this horror stop.

Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest, is published in the UK by Guardian Faber. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.

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