Why Putin Didn’t Invade Ukraine During Trump’s Presidency

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00:00Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine was home to about 44 million people, roughly the same as Spain.

00:05It's one of the largest countries by landmass, not population on the European continent.

00:09So it's a big and important place, but it's not the kind of place that would normally be at the center of U.S. politics.

00:15Except it very much has been. For years, Ukraine has occupied an outsized role in American political discourse.

00:22Just look at a guy like Paul Manafort. You might remember him.

00:25Back in 2016, he was named chairman of the Trump campaign and chief strategist.

00:30He was one of many members of a rotating cast of drifters and yes-men who surrounded then-candidate Trump.

00:36Manafort, though, was a veteran political operative who got his start in the 1970s,

00:41working with the likes of self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone and Lee Atwater,

00:46the late Republican hatchet man behind the wildly racist Willie Horton ad of the 1988 presidential campaign.

00:53And then Manafort's career took a bit of a turn.

00:55He started making a living, a lucrative one, by advising and lobbying on behalf of dictators and strongmen.

01:01In the early 2000s, he started working for Russian President Vladimir Putin's puppet candidate to lead Ukraine,

01:08a guy named Viktor Yanukovych.

01:10Now, Yanukovych had tried to steal the presidential election in Ukraine in October 2004

01:17through stuffed ballot boxes and voter intimidation, and his opponent, the pro-Ukraine guy,

01:23was even poisoned, apparently, by Russian agents.

01:25Remember that? His face became disfigured.

01:28And all of that, the macabre spectacle, the face disfigurement,

01:32led to a popular uprising in Ukraine known as the Orange Revolution,

01:37and it brought Viktor Yanukovych down.

01:39It handed the election to the legitimate winner.

01:41It was around this time that Yanukovych hired Paul Manafort.

01:45Manafort was assisted by a political operative named Konstantin Kalimnik,

01:50who U.S. investigators say is a Russian intelligence official

01:52and was integral to Manafort's dealings in Ukraine and Russia.

01:57Manafort then gave the Ukrainian Putin candidate a complete political makeover,

02:01dressing him like a more traditional politician,

02:04coiffed hair, nice suits.

02:06Manafort taught the candidate how to mime empathy when speaking to voters,

02:09how to modulate his voice when giving speeches.

02:12As journalist Franklin Fork reported in Slate,

02:15quote, one Ukrainian columnist cheekily asked his readers to identify the 10 elements

02:19of Yanukovych rallies that Manafort had imported from the Republican conventions he'd run.

02:24And guess what? Their work paid off.

02:27The Putin puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, won the Ukrainian presidency in 2010

02:31in an election that was still tainted by allegations of corruption,

02:34but it did look like he really won.

02:36And things were going fine for this new Putin-approved president for a few years

02:40until 2013.

02:43And that's why Yanukovych refused to sign this trade agreement with the European Union,

02:47opting instead to align Ukraine closer with, you guessed it, Russia.

02:52And this decision, along with the naked corruption of Yanukovych and his cronies,

02:56sparked massive protests across the country spanning multiple months.

03:00Yanukovych was eventually forced out of office as a result,

03:03eventually fleeing in the middle of the night to Russia in early 2014.

03:07Putin was not happy.

03:09He had lost his puppet president, and there were huge pro-democracy protests next door.

03:15This was a seismic moment for the Russian president,

03:18and you can see that in three brazen geopolitical moves that he made afterwards.

03:23The first thing he did was to seize Crimea from Ukraine.

03:25Almost immediately after those pro-democracy protests in Ukraine,

03:30Putin sent armed soldiers, his little green men, into Crimea, no flags on their uniforms.

03:35They occupied government buildings, and Russian forces quickly took control.

03:39It was, up until that point, the largest European land grab since World War II.

03:44And Putin basically got away with it.

03:46There was international condemnation and some sanctions,

03:48but nothing close to the outcry we're seeing today.

03:51That leads us to the second brazen thing he did.

03:54In 2015, Putin deployed official Russian troops outside the former Soviet republics

03:59for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

04:02He sent troops to intervene in Syria,

04:04and they are still there today to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.

04:08That intervention was incredibly expensive and brutal, but essentially decisive.

04:12Putin managed to secure the victory he wanted, and Assad has stayed in power.

04:17That same year, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his run for president.

04:21And right before the RNC, where he will accept the party nomination,

04:24Trump hires Paul Manafort to come run his campaign for free.

04:30Manafort, the guy who got Putin's puppet elected in Ukraine,

04:32is now in charge of the Trump campaign.

04:35And during Manafort's short tenure, the campaign altered the official Republican platform

04:38to tone down its support for military assistance to Ukraine,

04:42which, in no uncertain terms, was a direct gift and signal to Russia.

04:47And Trump's own ties to Russian money started coming under scrutiny.

04:51So, to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs.

04:58That's what he said.

04:59That's what I said.

05:00That's obviously what our position is.

05:04Convincing.

05:04As campaign manager, Paul Manafort also stayed in contact with that alleged Russian operative,

05:09Konstantin Kalimnik, who many suspected was just a direct link between the campaign and Russian intelligence.

05:14The two men would later go on to cook up this bizarre plot where the eastern Ukrainian territory of Donbass,

05:21now the target of Putin's invasion or the place where the war started, because it never really stopped,

05:27that the Donbass would break off into its own pro-Russia country,

05:30possibly under the rule of disgraced Putin-backed former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.

05:35Now, Manafort was ultimately ousted from the Trump campaign after his obvious corruption and ties to Russia

05:42were too much even for them, which brings us back to Putin and his third incredibly brazen act,

05:48and that is interfering in the 2016 U.S. election in a pretty profound way.

05:53It is, of course, impossible to measure the impact of Russia's hack-and-leak disinformation campaign,

05:57but regardless, Putin again got his desired outcome. Donald Trump improbably elected president.

06:05So think about it. After the Mayden, after Ukraine pulls away from Russia, kicking out his stooge,

06:12Putin does these three incredibly brazen things all in a row, and they all work out surprisingly well.

06:16Seizes Crimea, boosts Assad, helps get Donald Trump elected, all in the span of three years.

06:22Now he has an ally in Donald Trump, which is, of course, incredibly important,

06:25because Vladimir Putin doesn't really have so-called soft power to pressure foreign policy,

06:31aside from natural gas and oil. While that can be very influential, it's not the same kind of soft

06:35power the U.S. and NATO and others can wield in different parts of the world. But Trump becomes

06:42Putin's soft power. We see it play out in all kinds of ways, like pushing the leader of Montenegro out of

06:47the way at a NATO meeting and repeating the weird Russian line about Montenegro starting World War III by

06:52joining NATO. Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people. Yeah, I'm not against Montenegro.

07:00Or Albania. No, by the way, they're very strong people. They're very aggressive people. They may

07:05get aggressive. And congratulations, you're in World War III. Now, is Trump repeating Moscow's

07:12position basically verbatim, just like the way Trump would work to delegitimize NATO as a deadbeat

07:17alliance taking advantage of the U.S. You know, I went to NATO where we were being ripped off because

07:23the other countries, you have 29 countries, and the other countries weren't paying their bills. They

07:28were delinquent, you know, in real estate. I noticed people are using that word. I've been using it for

07:33the last year. It's like a real estate term. That's when they don't pay their rent. Putin's influence could

07:38also be seen in the centrality of Ukraine in Trump's attacks on Hunter Biden, which, of course,

07:44undermined the country's legitimacy, highlighted its very real and rampant political corruption,

07:49culminating, of course, in Trump's first impeachment for threatening to withhold military aid

07:53from Ukrainian President Zelensky unless he helped dig up dirt on the Bidens.

07:58In simpler terms, Trump helped legitimize Putin, elevate his status on the world stage,

08:02undermine NATO. So when Republican politicians say that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine under Trump,

08:07they are probably right, but for the wrong reasons. Putin likely would not have invaded because he did not

08:13need to, because Trump was his ultimate gift, doing everything Putin himself wanted to do,

08:18elevating Russia, denigrating NATO, delegitimizing Ukraine. Without him in the White House, Putin took

08:24matters into his own hands. Invading Ukraine, putting the country once again at the center of U.S. politics.

08:43in front of his party for some more, let's series two ministers.

08:48ar

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