By Mark Mazzetti and Adam Entous
On July 7, 2017, following the handshake between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, Germany, to mark the end of their first in-person discussion, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson exited the austere conference room, extracted notes from his pocket, and provided a concerned summary to White House aides.
“We have to persuade the president regarding Ukraine,” Tillerson remarked.
The Secretary had just observed Putin, the former KGB leader, effectively attempting to influence the mindset of the new American president.
The Russian leader portrayed Ukraine, a former Soviet territory aspiring to join the European Union and NATO, in a negative light. He described Ukraine to Trump as a corrupt and fictional nation. He claimed Russia, which had taken the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine three years prior and supported pro-Russian separatists in a border area, was justified in asserting influence over Ukraine.
Trump informed Putin that his administration was contemplating supplying weapons to Ukraine. “What are your thoughts?” Trump asked, to which Putin responded that it would be “a mistake.”
Trump, equipped with aggressive talking points prepared by his aides, reportedly did not argue against Putin’s assertions, according to three U.S. officials present at the Hamburg summit.
The encounter has become a historical footnote of the Trump presidency, largely eclipsed by the subsequent summit with Putin in Helsinki, where Trump famously stated he trusted Putin over his own intelligence agencies regarding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
However, a detailed look at the Hamburg meeting and the preceding months reveals insights into the origins of Trump’s often dismissive perspective on Ukraine.
The Hamburg gathering was part of a year-long trend, where Trump’s increasing political bitterness towards Ukraine provided an opportunity for Putin to work toward diminishing American support for Ukraine, based on interviews with U.S. and European officials, Trump’s allies, and memoirs.
This animosity towards Ukraine remains a significant factor in the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign. Trump has not clarified his intentions regarding military and diplomatic support for Ukraine should he be elected, raising questions about potential reductions in assistance amid Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia.
The beliefs Trump was forming in 2016 and 2017 may, should he regain the presidency, influence policies with significant implications for European stability, NATO’s future, and relations between the U.S. and Russia.
Upon taking office, Trump harbored suspicions that Ukrainian officials were discreetly partial to Democrats. During initial interactions, Putin sought to instill in Trump the impression that Ukraine was not a vibrant young democracy seeking closer ties to the West, but rather an unstable Russian-speaking neighbor governed by shadowy oligarchs and corrupt officials who had aimed to help elect Hillary Clinton.
These suspicions would later resurface in the events leading to Trump’s first impeachment, initiated by a call in 2019 with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then Ukraine’s newly elected president. During this call, Trump suggested that U.S. military assistance to Ukraine was contingent upon whether Zelenskyy would investigate his political opponents.
Trump’s distrust of Ukraine and his beliefs that its leaders favored Democrats continue to manifest in the ongoing presidential campaign. Last month, during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump avoided a straightforward question about whether he supported Ukraine in its conflict.
Recently, he accused Zelenskyy of leveraging his visit to the United States to aid Harris’ campaign by appearing at a munitions factory in Pennsylvania.
When questioned about the evolution of Trump’s views, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, stated solely that it was President Joe Biden and Harris’ “weakness” that led to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“President Trump will restore global peace through American strength and ensure that European nations contribute their fair share to our collective defense, alleviating the disproportionate burden on American taxpayers,” she said in a statement sent via email.
In August 2016, just under three months before Trump’s unexpected election victory, his campaign suffered a major setback.
Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, resigned shortly after news emerged regarding an investigation by a Ukrainian government agency into handwritten records allegedly showing millions in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine, where he had served as a consultant.
Weeks earlier, Trump had publicly solicited Moscow’s aid in his campaign against Clinton, urging Russia to leak incriminating emails about his opponent that were stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee.
However, the revelation of the investigation into the ledgers fueled the belief among Trump’s allies that Ukrainian officials were colluding with the Democrats to tarnish the reputation of the Trump campaign.
By that point, Trump had made occasional public remarks regarding Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia. Typically, he questioned the prudence of sending financial aid and weapons to a nation he perceived as having little strategic value to the United States, especially when powerful European nations like Germany hesitated to do so for fear of provoking Moscow.
Yet, within Trump’s inner circle, a more sinister image of Ukraine began to take shape, depicting it as a nation rife with Trump’s political adversaries.
A spontaneous discussion Trump had at a fundraising dinner late in 2016 seemed to reinforce this notion in the mind of the future president. In October of that year, a Trump campaign donor named Robert Pereira hosted the candidate at his seaside mansion in Hillsboro Beach, Florida.
Among the guests was Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born American who later assisted Trump and Rudy Giuliani in seeking compromising information about Hunter Biden in Ukraine and subsequently turned against Trump.
H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser, recounted in his memoir that during Trump’s June 2017 meeting with Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine at that time, Trump bluntly stated that he had heard from “a Ukrainian friend” that Ukraine was corrupt and that the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia had annexed in 2014, actually belonged to Russia.
Parnas believes he was the one referenced. “I was the only Ukrainian American friend he had at that time,” he stated.
As he geared up to assume office, all these episodes, along with subsequent findings by U.S. intelligence that Russia had intervened to assist in Trump’s election, were interpreted by Trump as a strategy to cast doubt on the validity of his victory. These circumstances created a favorable landscape for Putin to navigate when he and Trump engaged in their first phone conversation on January 28, 2017.
According to a former high-ranking U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of the call, Trump was the one to broach the subject of Ukraine, asking Putin for his thoughts on the country due to conflicting opinions he had encountered.
Putin seized the opportunity. He embarked on a lengthy discourse about the corruption in Ukraine.
At that time, the FBI was looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the connections between Trump’s advisors and those tied to the Kremlin. In response, some of Trump’s allies began to propagate a baseless theory, suggesting that the Democratic National Committee’s hacked server was situated in Ukraine, asserting that the FBI couldn’t investigate it.
Putin fanned the flames, publicly claiming Ukraine had attempted to assist Clinton.
Soon after, Trump began to promote the conspiracy theory linking the DNC server to Ukraine, including in an April 2017 interview with The Washington Examiner. “Somebody had mentioned, and this may be incorrect, a company that’s owned by someone from the Ukraine,” he remarked. “You’ve heard that, I assume you’ve heard that?”
As Trump’s grievances against Ukraine mounted, certain advisers attempted in vain to convince him that the theories regarding Ukrainian electoral sabotage were unfounded.
Thomas Bossert, the homeland security adviser at the White House, indicated that he engaged in “lengthy conversations with the president” to enlighten Trump on the intelligence gathered by American agencies, which clearly indicated that Russia, not Ukraine, had interfered in the 2016 election.
“I debunked the claims that the servers were in Ukraine to Trump, and I reiterated the intelligence community’s conclusion that it was Russia, not Ukraine, with substantial evidence, with intelligence community evidence, abundant evidence,” Bossert reported in an interview.
There is scant evidence that Trump heeded this information.
McMaster and Bossert readied Trump for the Hamburg meeting with Putin. The firm stance they advocated regarding Moscow was articulated in a speech Trump delivered the day before the summit. On July 6, 2017, Trump addressed an enthusiastic crowd at Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, delivering a stern warning to Putin: Keep out of Ukraine.
However, the following day in Hamburg, while facing Putin, the American president listened intently as Putin presented his monologue. McMaster noted in his account that Putin “utilized his time with Trump to mount a sophisticated and sustained effort to manipulate him.”
When Tillerson regrouped after the meeting with several of Trump’s advisors, including McMaster and Fiona Hill, a senior National Security Council member, Tillerson remarked that the Russian president had executed his “KGB tactics” on Trump, according to Hill. Tillerson emphasized to them that they had substantial work ahead to counter Putin’s anti-Ukraine propaganda.
“Putin was essentially conveying that you cannot trust Ukraine and do not provide them with anything,” Hill recalled from Tillerson’s briefing.
