Would Putin be moving against Ukraine if Trump were President?

 Freddy Gray:

“I know Vladimir Putin very well,” said Donald Trump yesterday, speaking of the Ukraine crisis, “he would have never done during the Trump administration what he is doing now.” As with a lot of Trump utterances, that statement is at once arrogant, preposterous — and probably true.

Maybe it is a coincidence — or Trump’s often-cited luck — that the last major crisis over Ukraine was back in 2014, after Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and Putin annexed Crimea. Or perhaps not.

Back then Barack Obama led the free world and, busy as he was, he offloaded the knotty Ukraine problem on to his Vice President Joe Biden, which I wrote about here yesterday.

In the years since, we’ve heard a lot about Russia’s further expansionist aims in the Donbas, Ukraine, and even the NATO Baltic states. But it is only now, one year into Joe Biden’s presidency, that Putin has made his first significant move since that annexation of Crimea.

In the Trump years, for all the talk of America’s Commander-in-Chief being Putin’s puppet, Russia more or less behaved itself. In public, at least, Putin tolerated the Minsk II accords, signed in 2015 following negotiations between Russia, Belarus, France, Germany and Ukraine.
...

A simpler explanation is more likely. Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognized — an unstable, unpredictable yet potentially decisive actor on the world stage. Rightly or wrongly, he saw in Trump strength whereas in the Democratic leadership he sees only weakness and folly.

Trump also pointed out yesterday that, under his leadership, oil prices stayed low which helped limit Putin’s ability to act. Quite how much credit Trump can take for that is a matter for debate. But it’s reasonable to say that Biden’s ultra-green Build Back Better agenda has so far been much better news for global oil and gas investments than Donald Trump’s administration ever was. As Trump, always with dollar signs in his mind, pointed out yesterday “Putin is not only getting what he wanted, but getting, because of the oil and gas surge, richer and richer.”
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Biden's energy policies are helping to finance Russian aggression.  It is one of the strategic blunders of all time, but, unfortunately, Biden has three more years to top it with further screw-ups.

See, also:

UN chief denounces Russia as world braces for 'tidal waves of suffering' in Ukraine

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