At the beginning of 2017, American intelligence agencies issued an unequivocal judgment on why President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had ordered a temptular effort to sabotage the recent American presidential elections.
Putin wanted to paralyze the faith that the Americans have in their own elections, found and undermines a “liberal world order” led by the United States that the Russians see as a threat to their security. As a way to achieve this, the evaluation has found, Russia has worked to help Donald J. Trump win the elections.
Eight years later, Trump sat in the oval office for a stormy meeting with the president Voldymyr Zelensky from Ukraine and has once again made his judgment at that time. There was no Russian sabotage, only a “false witch hunt” of which both he and Mr. Putin were victims.
“Let me tell you, Putin has crossed a lot with me,” he said.
The statement was a story. The president sees the common cause with Mr. Putin, a fusion of interests forged through battles against those who believe are his and mutual opponents of Putin, including democratic legislators, European leaders and a “deep state” ghostly within the government of the United States.
The relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin has been examined by the American government investigations for years, assessments by foreign intelligence services and media investigations. As a whole, they discovered evidence in support of a series of theories that face the affinity of Mr. Trump for a strong Russian man who has spent a career in an attempt to undermine American interests.
So far there is no single ordered explanation. But based exclusively on the public actions of Mr. Trump during his first six weeks ago in charge, the simple fact is that he made some decisions on national security or foreign policy that were not rejoiced by the Kremlin, making his position against Mr. Putin more consequential than ever.
This is a reversed world for Susan Miller, the former head of counterintelligence at the CIA, who led the evaluation of the 2017 intelligence of the Russian electoral interference agency.
Miller Miller declared in an interview that thinks that the affinity of Mr. Trump for the Russian president is reduced to the envy of “autocrates” – who craves the power that Mr. Putin must make decisions in Russia without any constraint.
“Trump likes Putin because Putin has control of his country,” he said. “And Trump wants control over his country.”
Trump accused Mr. Zelensky of starting the war that began with a Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a war that saw the mass massacre of Ukrainian civilians. He stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine that the country must desperately fight Russian forces.
He gathered American foreign aid programs that Putin has detested for a long time, including programs in favor of democracy in countries such as Hungary that Russia is bringing its sphere of influence closer. He put the European allies aside, saying that they are unreliable and suggesting that they could have to defend themselves in the future.
Mr. Trump defended his actions in part by saying that they are necessary steps to bring Russia to the negotiation table, throwing himself as a peace broker to end the war in Ukraine. So far, however, he has pushed much stronger with Mr. Zelensky to make concessions than he has on Putin.
On Friday, he started the day with a social media place that threatened the economic sanctions against Russia for what he said it was the “hammering” that the Russian military was delivering to Ukraine. In The Oval Office hours later, however, he seemed to defend Mr. Putin, saying that the “bombing of Russia from hell from Ukraine” was actually a sign that Russia wanted to end the war. He criticized Ukraine in order not to be motivated not to be motivated to end the conflict.
“What is Putin getting? He is becoming more than he and other former KGB officers have ever dreamed of, “said Calder Walton of the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard, who wrote a book on the history of espionage between Russia and the United States.
“This is the dismantling before our eyes of the international order led by the United States, something that Putin has worked throughout his career,” he said.
How much does all this please Russian officials? Ask only them.
Dmitry Peskov, the longtime spokesman for the Kremlin, went to state television two days after the Oval Office swept away with Mr. Zelensky and praised the decisions of the Trump administration since he went up to power. The new agenda of the White House, he said, “largely aligns our vision”.
On the same day, Sergey V. Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, presented to the Russians a completely different vision of world history compared to what the Cremlin officials taught for decades. Lavrov said that they were European nations, not to the United States, that they were responsible for so many great tragedies in history: citing the crusades, the Napoleonic wars, the First World War and the Hitler ascent.
“If we look at history in retrospective,” he said, “the Americans have not played any role of instigation, let alone, incendiary.”
Miller Miller said that there are no doubts among the members of her counterintelligence team regarding the intentions of Russia in interrupting the 2016 elections: to spread the disinformation and sow chaos with the aim of undermining trust in the democratic process.
At the same time, he said, his agency team – which was reached by officials of the National Security Agency and the FBI – was extremely attentive and fiercely not partisan in evaluating the impact of the Russian interference on the victory of the elections of Mr. Trump.
However, during the first administration of Trump found herself in the crossed hair of the team of public ministries led by John Durham, which the attorney general William P. Barr had appointed to investigate the origins of the investigations in Russia of the FBI. He said Mr. Durham and other public ministries shouted it for more than eight hours on the evaluation of intelligence.
“They were looking for prejudices in our work,” said Mrs. Miller. “Nobody found any.” The final report of Durham did not find any mistakes in the evaluation of the 2017 intelligence.
However, the anger of Mr. Trump for what he calls the “Russian hoax” is tormented for years, such a profound complaint that he now sees Mr. Putin as his ally in the victim.
Putin has spent years trying to model the thought of Mr. Trump on Ukraine, and now there is little light of the day among men’s public declarations on the war.
The first time that Mr. Trump and Putin met in person, during a summit in July 2017 in Hamburg, Germany, the Russian president used for most of the time who denigrated Ukraine as a corrupt and manufactured country.
He said Russia had every right to exercise influence on Ukraine. He even justified Russian military operations in the country by increasing the historical example of the conviction of President Theodore Roosevelt that the United States had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Latin America countries.
Mr. Trump is a long -standing Roosevelt admirer.
Leaving the meeting, Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, told the anxious helpers of the White House that Mr. Putin had made his “Kgb Shick” and that Mr. Trump had not rejected any assertion of the Russian President on Ukraine.
More than two years later, the Chamber questioned Mr. Trump due to a phone call from July 2019 which he had with Mr. Zelensky, during which he made continuous American military support to Ukraine contingent in Ukraine for having contributed to digging dirt on his political opponents.
The episode further radicalized the opinions of Mr. Trump not only towards Ukraine, but also for his enemies perceived “profound state” that testified during the impeachment procedures.
He also began to radicalize other republicans against Ukraine, who began to echo some of the language that Mr. Putin used for a long time on the country.
This convergence of opinions has become even more pronounced in the weeks since Mr. Trump returned to power, while his administration presses in Ukraine to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia.
On Wednesday, the secretary of state Marco Rubio characterized the conflict in Ukraine on Fox News not as a clear case of Russian aggression, but as a dangerous “war by prosecutor” between the United States and Russia.
Mr. Peskov, spokesman for the Kremlin, said in a statement later he accepted completely. It was, he said, another example of the positions of the White House and the Kremlin aligned “perfectly”.