Цена вопроса

Оставляя в стороне экзистенциальное напряжение американских выборов, обратим внимание на дополнительные штрихи к истории, которые всплыли в последние месяцы.



Прояснились в частности некоторые детали разговоров Трампа с Путиным в Гамбурге в июле 2017. Бывшему госсекретарю Тиллерсону (автору выражения "fucking moron"), пришлось разгребать последствия обработки клиента по вопросу Украины.

On July 7, 2017, after President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shook hands in Hamburg, Germany, to conclude their first face-to-face meeting, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson walked out of the sterile conference room, removed notes from his pocket and gave anxious White House aides a summary.
"We've got work to do to change the president's mind on Ukraine," Mr. Tillerson said.
The secretary of state had just watched Mr. Putin, the former K.G.B. spymaster, put on a master class in seeking to shape the thinking of the new American president.
The Russian leader disparaged Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with aspirations of joining the European Union and NATO. Ukraine, he told Mr. Trump, was a corrupt, fabricated country. Russia, which had seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine three years earlier and backed pro-Russia separatists in a border region, had every right to exert its influence over the country, he insisted.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Putin that his administration was considering giving weapons to Ukraine. "What do you think?" Mr. Trump asked, to which Mr. Putin said it would be "a mistake." <...>
Mr. McMaster and Mr. Bossert prepared Mr. Trump for the Hamburg meeting with Mr. Putin. The tough stance they supported toward Moscow was evident in a speech Mr. Trump gave the day before the summit. On July 6, 2017, Mr. Trump stood before a jubilant crowd assembled at Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, and sent a stern message to Mr. Putin: Stay out of Ukraine.
Russia, Mr. Trump said in a line included in the speech at Mr. McMaster's insistence, should "cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine" and join "responsible nations in our fight against common enemies."
But the next day in Hamburg, sitting across from Mr. Putin, the American president listened as Mr. Putin delivered a monologue. Mr. McMaster wrote in his book that Mr. Putin "used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him."
Beyond his usual points about Ukrainian corruption, Mr. Putin made an argument that he had a duty to protect Russian speakers in the eastern part of the country, along the border with Russia, from "ethnic cleansing."
Mr. Putin even brought up an episode from American history to defend Russian military operations. Just as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, advanced by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, justified American intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, he said, so was Russia justified in operating inside Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking citizens there.
Fiona Hill, a senior member of Mr. Trump’s National Security Council staff who was in Hamburg for the summit, said she believed that Mr. Putin most likely referred to Roosevelt in the meeting “because he did his homework” and knew that Mr. Trump had a fixation on the former “strongman” president.
When Mr. Tillerson huddled after the meeting with several of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Mr. McMaster and Ms. Hill, Mr. Tillerson said that the Russian president had done his “K.G.B. shtick” on Mr. Trump, Ms. Hill recounted. Mr. Tillerson, she said, stressed that they all had work to do to counter Mr. Putin’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric.
“Putin was basically telling him that you can’t trust Ukraine, and don’t give them anything,” Ms. Hill recalled about Mr. Tillerson’s briefing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/05/us/politics/trump-putin-ukraine.html

( Read more... )