Just Sitting Down With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead (NYT)

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/world/europe/trump-putin-helsinki-summit.html

Just Sitting Down With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead
By Andrew Higgins and Neil MacFarquhar
July 15, 2018

...

As with any negotiation, timing is everything, and Mr. Putin has been gaining a lot of momentum lately. He will arrive in Helsinki after presiding over the final game of the World Cup soccer tournament in Moscow on Sunday, and will meet an American president who has spent the last week berating his NATO allies and undercutting his host in Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May.

Even the indictment announced on Friday in Washington against 12 Russian military intelligence officers, which prompted some Democrats to demand the cancellation of the Helsinki meeting, could help Mr. Putin by playing into a conspiracy theory long embraced by both the Kremlin and the White House that the “deep state” is determined to sabotage Mr. Trump’s outreach to Russia. Right before the indictments were announced, in fact, Mr. Trump referred to the Russia investigation as a “rigged witch hunt” that “really hurts our relationship with Russia.”

Anything that stokes divisions inside the United States, or between America and its allies, is viewed by Moscow as a victory. Deploying hackers, disinformation campaigns and support for far-right populist forces in Europe, Mr. Putin has long sought to fracture the West and upend the established geopolitical order. But Mr. Trump, who routinely attacks European leaders and has started a trade war with some of America’s closest allies, is now effectively doing the job for him.

Mr. Trump’s persistent tirades on the expense of NATO and his fury at the trade practices of the European Union, which he recently described as “possibly as bad as China, just smaller,” have startled even Russian pundits who have for years watched as Mr. Putin, like Soviet-era leaders before him, tried in vain to undermine the trans-Atlantic alliance.

“We are witnessing something surprising, something that even the Soviet Union was not able to accomplish: Divide the U.S. and Western Europe. It didn’t work then, but it seems to be working with Mr. Trump now,” Tatyana Parkhalina, president of the Russian Association for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, said on a recent talk show on state-run television.

....

[underpants]

1. Remember he attacked Crimea right after the Sochi Olympics

Estonia. Just saying.

[dalton99a]

2. +1. And Russia invaded Georgia during the 2008 Summer Olympics

The first European war of the 21st century