By Mark Mazzetti and Adam Entous
On July 7, 2017, after President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia shook hands in Hamburg, Germany, to conclude their first face-to-face meeting, Secretary of State Rex 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,” Tillerson said.
The secretary of state had just watched Putin, the former KGB 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 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.
Trump told Putin that his administration was considering giving weapons to Ukraine. “What do you think?” Trump asked, to which Putin said it would be “a mistake.”
Trump, who came to the meeting armed with hawkish talking points drawn up by his advisers, never pushed back, according to three U.S. officials who were in Hamburg for the summit.
The meeting is something of a historical footnote to the Trump presidency. It has long been overshadowed by the summit with Putin the next year in Helsinki, when Trump famously said he took the word of Putin over his own intelligence agencies on the question of whether Russia had interfered with the 2016 presidential election.
Yet a close examination of the Hamburg summit, and the months that led up to it, help explain the roots of Trump’s often-disdainful attitude toward Ukraine.
The meeting in Hamburg fit into a yearlong pattern in which an escalating political grudge against Ukraine on Trump’s part became an opening for Putin to pursue his own aim of tempering American support for Ukraine, according to interviews with U.S. and European officials and allies of Trump, as well as accounts in memoirs.
That animus toward Ukraine remains front and center in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign. Trump has left unclear whether, if elected, he would cut off or reduce American military and diplomatic support for Ukraine as it battles the Russian invasion.
The views that Trump was developing in 2016 and 2017 could, if he returns to the White House, shape policies with profound consequences for the stability of Europe, the future of NATO and America’s relations with Russia.
Trump came into office with suspicions that officials in Ukraine not so secretly favored Democrats. Then, during their initial contacts, Putin worked to cement in Trump’s head the idea that Ukraine was less a feisty young democracy eager for deeper ties to the West than an unruly Russian-speaking neighbor run by shadowy oligarchs and corrupt officials who had sought to help elect Hillary Clinton.
Those suspicions would surface in the events that led to Trump’s first impeachment, triggered by a 2019 phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then Ukraine’s newly elected president. During the call, Trump implied that American military support to Ukraine was conditioned on whether Zelenskyy helped investigate his political rivals.
Trump’s skepticism about Ukraine and his suspicions that the country’s leaders favor Democrats continue to play out in the current presidential campaign. During his debate last month with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump sidestepped a direct question about whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war.
Last week, he accused Zelenskyy of using his recent trip to the United States to bolster Harris’ campaign through an appearance at a munitions factory in Pennsylvania.
In response to questions about the development of Trump’s views, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, replied only that “weakness” on the part of President Joe Biden and Harris was to blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“President Trump will restore world peace through American strength and ensure European nations carry their weight by paying their fair share to our mutual defense to lighten the unfair burden on American taxpayers,” she said in an emailed statement.
In August 2016, less than three months before Trump’s stunning election win, his campaign took a body blow.
Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, resigned days after news broke about an investigation by a Ukrainian government agency into handwritten ledgers purporting to show millions in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine, where he had worked as a consultant.
Weeks earlier, Trump had publicly appealed to Moscow for help in his campaign against Clinton, encouraging Russia to leak damaging emails about his opponent that Russian government hackers had stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
But the disclosure of the investigation into the ledgers was seen among Trump allies as evidence that the Ukrainian officials were in cahoots with the Democrats to sully the Trump campaign’s reputation.
By that point in the campaign, Trump had spoken in public on occasion about Ukraine’s simmering conflict with Russia. Usually it was to question the wisdom of sending money and arms to a country that he saw as being of little strategic importance to the United States when powerful European countries like Germany refused, or were reluctant to do so, for fear of antagonizing Moscow.
But, within Trump’s circle, a darker portrait of Ukraine began to emerge, one of a country filled with Trump’s political enemies.
An impromptu conversation Trump had at a fundraising dinner late in the 2016 campaign seemed to reinforce this view with the future president. In October of that year, a Trump campaign donor named Robert Pereira hosted the candidate at his oceanside mansion in Hillsboro Beach, Florida.
Among those in attendance was Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born American who would go on to help Trump and Rudy Giuliani try to find damaging information about Hunter Biden in Ukraine and then turn against Trump.
H.R. McMaster, a former White House national security adviser, wrote in his recent memoir that during the president’s June 2017 meeting with Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at the time, Trump said bluntly he had heard from “a Ukrainian friend” that Ukraine was a corrupt country, and that the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, was actually part of Russia.
Parnas said he believes that was a reference to him. “I’m the only Ukrainian American friend he had at the time,” he said.
As he prepared to take office, all of these events, and subsequent findings by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had intervened to help get Trump elected, were seen by Trump as an attempt to sow doubt about the legitimacy of his victory. And they created fertile ground for Putin to exploit when he and Trump spoke by phone on Jan. 28, 2017, their first call of Trump’s presidency.
According to a former senior U.S. official with direct knowledge of what took place during the call, it was Trump who first raised the issue of Ukraine, asking Putin to give his opinion about the country because he had heard differing views.
The Russian president seized the opening. He launched into an extended monologue about corruption in Ukraine.
At the time, the FBI was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and contacts between Trump’s advisers and individuals connected to the Kremlin. In response, some of Trump’s allies began circulating a baseless theory that the Democratic National Committee’s hacked computer server was actually in Ukraine and that the FBI was never able to examine it.
Putin stoked the fire, publicly asserting that Ukraine had tried to assist Clinton.
Soon, Trump began promoting the conspiracy theory about a link between the DNC server and 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 somebody from the Ukraine,” he said. “You’ve heard that, I assume you’ve heard that?”
As Trump’s resentment toward Ukraine began to build, some of his advisers tried unsuccessfully to convince him that conspiracy theories about Ukrainian election sabotage were baseless.
Thomas Bossert, the White House homeland security adviser, said he had “lengthy conversations with the president” to brief Trump on all the intelligence collected by American spy agencies showing it was Russia, not Ukraine, that meddled in the 2016 election.
“I refuted the notions that the servers were in Ukraine to Trump, and I reaffirmed the intelligence community’s conclusion that it was Russia and not Ukraine with evidence, with intelligence community evidence, voluminous evidence,” Bossert said in an interview.
There is little evidence that Trump listened.
McMaster and Bossert prepared Trump for the Hamburg meeting with Putin. The tough stance they supported toward Moscow was evident in a speech Trump gave the day before the summit. On July 6, 2017, Trump stood before a jubilant crowd assembled at Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, and sent a stern message to Putin: Stay out of Ukraine.
But the next day in Hamburg, sitting across from Putin, the American president listened as Putin delivered a monologue. McMaster wrote in his book that Putin “used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him.”
When Tillerson huddled after the meeting with several of Trump’s advisers, including McMaster and Fiona Hill, a senior member of Trump’s National Security Council staff, Tillerson said that the Russian president had done his “KGB shtick” on Trump, Hill recounted. Tillerson, she said, stressed that they all had work to do to counter Putin’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric.
“Putin was basically telling him that you can’t trust Ukraine, and don’t give them anything,” Hill recalled about Tillerson’s briefing.
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