Why DID Putin Wait Until Trump Was Out of Office to Invade Ukraine?
March 27, 2022
In a stroke of editorial genius, two letters to the editor appeared sequentially in the March 2, 2022, St Louis Post-Dispatch, six days after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Mr. A wrote:
Isn’t it ironic that Russian President Vladimir Putin waited for Donald Trump to leave office before he invaded Ukraine? Say what you will, but in my opinion, Trump’s foreign and domestic policies were the reason why there was stability during his tenure in office.
Followed by Ms. B, who wrote:
Republican pundits are correct when they say the Ukrainian invasion wouldn’t have happened if Donald Trump were president, but they are wrong as to why that is. In my opinion, the reason is because Russian President Vladimir Putin viewed Trump as an ally trying to achieve a similar agenda as his.
Putin is an anti-democracy dictator. As president, I believe Trump undermined basic democratic principles that ultimately led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump suggested pulling out of NATO, which would benefit Putin’s goal of weakening the alliance. Trump also shared classified information with Russian officials, received Russian assistance for his campaign and tried to deplete Ukraine’s resources through the extortion attempt that led to his first impeachment.
After Joe Biden became president, Putin lost a yes-man, and Putin became more isolated in his fight against NATO. Putin no longer had Trump’s unstable hold on democracy, nor does he have an American president trying to increase Ukraine’s vulnerability. Putin is now desperate because he lost the American president who fed into his vanity.
We now have an insider’s view on the question. Marie Yovanovitch has published a memoir titled Lessons from the Edge. She was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2016 (appointed by President Obama) to 2019 (fired by President Trump). Yovanovitch testified in Trump’s first impeachment hearing.
She spoke in an interview on National Public Radio on March 15, 2022. As the war in Ukraine was in its third week, conversation turned to President Putin’s past history of invasions, and her expectation that, if Putin is not stopped, “there is the likelihood that at some point he will continue moving west.”
As to why Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Yovanovich said,
I think that while Trump was president, Putin probably was feeling that he was getting what he needed from the American president, both in terms of Trump’s disdain for Ukraine as well as Trump’s disdain for NATO, frankly. A number of senior people around Trump have said that if Trump had won a second term, it’s unlikely that the U.S. would have stayed in NATO. So I think Putin was getting what he wanted from Trump and so no need to push in any other ways. When Biden was elected, clearly, he knew that President Biden, who had been very active … in supporting Ukraine when he was vice president, that he probably would not be as amenable to Russian influence in Ukraine, and so I think he looked for other means.
Given Putin’s goal of restoring the Russian Federation, it is likely he would have invaded Ukraine even if Trump had been re-elected. Trump paved Putin’s way by weakening NATO, undermining the EU, and disregarding international norms. Ironically, Putin reversed these trends when he underestimated the West’s cohesiveness in response to the invasion of Ukraine.