Vladimir Putin has pulled off a mini-coup in the White House, driven a painful wedge into the European Union, and is repairing his reputation as an indicted war criminal – all in one phone call.
In a couple of weeks, he will get the red-carpet treatment again, this time as a guest of Hungary’s Victor Orban, a leading light of the wannabe dictator club, to hold meetings with Donald Trump, no fan of democratic institutions himself.
He will swagger into Europe untroubled by the International Criminal Court indictments against him for war crimes in Ukraine, and as he stands gazing at Budapest’s golden Danube riverfront will breathe in the irony of the moment.
The former KGB officer managed to get hold of Trump on the phone before his meeting with Zelensky at the White House on Friday and bend the US president back to his will.
“I have just concluded my telephone conversation with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, and it was a very productive one,” Trump said on social media. “President Putin congratulated me and the United States on the Great Accomplishment of Peace in the Middle East.”
Then he revealed how easily he was manipulated by Putin, who told him that peace in the Middle East was something that, he said, “has been dreamed of for centuries. I actually believe that the Success in the Middle East will help in our negotiation in attaining an end to the War with Russia/Ukraine”.
Trump has not helped negotiate peace in the Middle East. He been part of a ceasefire agreement that is barely holding but was, critically, a moment when he signalled that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had won his war against Hamas – with American weapons.
Putin is keen to make sure that Ukraine is always seen by Trump as the “loser” and that the US is not tempted to give Kyiv any extra help.
He managed to do just that over the blower.
As he draws in the Budapest air, he’ll reflect that 26 years ago in the same city Britain, Russia, the US and Ukraine agreed to protect Kyiv’s independence in return for it giving up its vast nuclear arsenal.
And that he invaded Ukraine in 2014, annexed the Crimea soon after, and waged a war against Kyiv that for eight years was deliberately and publicly denied the protection, and help, it needed to see off the Kremlin – by the UK and the US.
Through this period, Russia also campaigned against the European Union. The EU had absorbed newly-minted democracies from the wreckage of the Soviet empire and Warsaw pact in eastern Europe – offering Russia’s citizens a vision of what freedom looked like.
Putin hated it.
He also hated Ukraine’s revolution that threw off Moscow’s control over its neighbour in 2013.
He has argued his whole political life that Ukraine is a Russian land – and ignored Moscow’s vile history here which includes the deliberate starvation of 3-7 million people in the Holodomor of the 1930s.
Ukraine is no natural colony of Russia, but it has lots of Russian speakers who are very glad they don’t live under Putin and are on track for EU membership, hope to join Nato, and have democracy and a free press.
Putin is accused of new war crimes over the mass abduction of Ukrainian children and the murder of civilians on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Hungary’s foreign minister has said that even though his country is a (reluctant and leaving) member of the ICC, arrangements will be made to make sure that Putin doesn’t get cuffed on arrival.
“We will ensure that he enters Hungary, has successful negotiations here, and then returns home,” Peter Szijjarto said.
“We will receive [Putin] with respect, host him, and provide the conditions for him to negotiate with the American president,” he added.
These talks are over Ukraine. But Zelensky will not be there.
He is not part of the Putin gang of proto-dictators who don’t like the EU.
Orban’s Hungary has been criticised by the EU for the drift away from liberal democracy there. The country is also the EU’s biggest importer of Russian fossil fuels – paying Moscow €416 million last August alone, which Putin no doubt put towards the war against Ukraine.
Orban is an enthusiast of Brexit. So are Trump and Putin. Anything that weakens European economic and political ties is good news for the Kremlin.
This explains his keen support over the years for what the Soviets used to call “useful idiots” like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and France’s right wing Le Pen dynasty, who all campaigned against the EU.
But it is over Ukraine where true colours are being shown.
Over the last month or so, it had appeared that Trump had shifted away from his vocally pro-Putin stand on Moscow’s invasion.
He had previously insisted that Ukraine was losing, and would have to cede territory. Trump tried to make sure of that by ending US support for Ukraine’s defence and caused Kyiv to stumble in its fight against Russia and many tens of thousands of casualties with an elongation of the war.
But he recently indicated, after painstaking diplomacy from Zelensky, that he thought Russia a “paper tiger” and that he would consider selling Tomahawk missiles to European nations for use by Ukraine. He has also been looking at boosting Ukraine air defences.
Zelensky went to lunch with Trump at the White House to plead for this help.
But as his delegation was already on the ground, talking to American arms suppliers, Putin got through on the red ‘phone to the Oval office and changed Trump’s agenda with spymaster purrs.
