Just sitting down with Trump, Putin comes out ahead

Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Moscow who is now director for foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, a research group in London, said he would normally cheer any chance for leaders to sit down and hash out their problems.

But, he added, “Putin versus Trump is not an equal contest” because of the Russian leader’s vastly superior knowledge of policy detail, his mastery of geopolitics and his past as a KGB officer schooled in the arts of persuasion, flattery and subterfuge.

...“If he can get Trump to come out and say the sort of things he said after meeting with Kim Jong-un, that is a big win for Putin.” Mr. Bond said. “If he can get him to say that all the problems between Russia and America have been cooked up by the Ukrainians and America’s deep state, or anything that leads in that direction, it will be a success for Putin,” he added.

Mr. Bond predicted that Mr. Putin, well aware of what buttons to push with Mr. Trump, would urge the American leader to halt the United States’ participation in Trident Juncture, one of NATO’s largest military exercises since the end of the Cold War, which the Kremlin sees as a provocation.