Trump edition: Why he hates Zelensky and loves Putin
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See site for details. Yesterday, reporters asked me if I thought President Putin was smart. I said, of course he's smart, to which I was greeted with, oh, that's such a terrible thing to say. What happened to Hillary Clinton's emails? 33,000 emails gone, just gone.

I think in Russia they wouldn't be gone so easily. I think it's a disgrace. A dictator without elections. Zelensky better move fast or he's not going to have a country left. Gotta move, gotta move fast. Did I say that? I can't believe I said that. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia

Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. I have a very good relationship with President Putin. I think I have a very good relationship with President Zelensky. Our president is interested in peace. So we will get characterized one way or another, oh, your stance is pro-Russia or pro-... It's all garbage. I'm Venetia Rainey, and this is Battle Lines, Trump edition. It's Friday, 7th of March, 2025.

This week, following unsuccessful attempts by Volodymyr Zelensky to repair the damage done during that Oval Office row, Donald Trump cut all American military aid to Ukraine. It was a huge move that made clear once and for all that Zelensky is no longer in favour in Washington. The decision divided America, provoked widespread criticism here in Europe and was heartily cheered by Russia.

So what's going on? Well, when events are moving this fast, sometimes it helps to take a step back and get a bit of context. Trump's apparent dislike for Zelensky has not come out of nowhere, nor has his embrace of Vladimir Putin's view of the war in Ukraine and NATO. There is a long and hugely contested history that's crucial to understanding the events of the last few weeks and whatever will unfold in the coming months and years of Trump's presidency. So on today's episode, we're going to be digging into that history.

Before we go any further, I just wanted to ask you to leave a review of this podcast if you're enjoying it. It really helps more listeners find us. Thanks in advance. So on with the show.

We're going to start with Trump and Zelensky's relationship. And to help us unpack it all, I'm joined by Arisia Litsevich, who's deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program and head of the Ukraine Forum, both at Chatham House. So Arisia, let's start with a bit of background. What do we know about Trump's views on Ukraine prior to Zelensky's election in 2019? The story of Trump's interest with Ukraine starts before he is elected, when he is running a race to win the White House.

And when he is convinced that it is Ukraine who is trying to interfere into U.S. elections on Hillary's side, he believes that Ukraine has some server that implicates Kiev in election interferings.

and wants to stage that it's actually Russia. So as if Ukraine was trying to conceal its action behind Russia's smoke screen. So when he wins the White House, this story haunts him. He thinks, okay, I am...

unjust fully accused of kind of being complicit with Russia and somehow because of Russian interference I'm not a legitimate president. I didn't make it on my own. Hold on. So Trump cannot really side with that story of Russian interference. So he gets into his mind an idea that it must have been Ukraine.

To be honest, I don't think Trump knew much about Ukraine. His point of reference was Moscow. This is where he was making his money. This is where his partners were. This is where he traveled. There was no Trump Tower in Ukraine, if you take this as a measure of Trump's world. So to be honest, he probably knew very little either of history or relationship between Ukraine and Russia. So for him, it was a bit of a tabula rasa.

OK, so the Zelensky-Trump story starts properly in July 2019. Trump is doing a review of foreign aid programmes and he unexpectedly singles out Ukraine. He says there's corruption and that Europe should be shouldering more of the burden. These are all arguments that now feel very familiar to us.

He orders nearly $400 million of American military and security aid to Ukraine to be frozen. So a week later, Trump calls Zelensky ostensibly to congratulate him for winning the Ukrainian election a few months earlier. But they also talk about Joe Biden, who was vice president at the time, but set to run in the 2020 election against Trump and Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

Trump famously says, according to a transcript that's released later, "I would like you to do us a favor, though." Can you explain what those favors were and why it was so controversial? So he decides basically on that phone call to ask President Zelensky, who was just elected in May of 2019, very fresh,

Without big international experience, probably not fully understanding U.S. domestic politics and how toxic already Ukraine is in Trump's mind, goes into that call and kind of in a friendly manner tries to play into Trump's ego, but also give him some promises.

He says, hold on, I have my prosecutor general. We'll look into some paperwork. And Trump at that moment also mentions, and I would love to have that server to debunk the idea that it was Russia who was interfering in elections, not Ukraine. And he says, well, if you're not going to do it, we're going to...

withhold military assistance that at that time wasn't so significant, but it was moving towards provision of lethal weapons, de facto blackmailing Zelensky, either you give me the papers or you will not want to get javelins.

So what happened next? Did Zelensky agree to turn over these servers or investigate Hunter Biden? On the call, Zelensky was very friendly with Trump. He was kind of flattering him how impressed he is by his leadership. And he hinted that having

some leverage over Ukrainian prosecutor general who was just appointed and part of his team, he'll try to find what's in the file. He never said, I'm not going to interfere into law enforcement agencies. He said, we'll try to do what we can.

The problem is that it kind of crashed into impeachment hearings too soon to know whether eventually Zelensky would have cooperated with Trump or not. In Trump's mind, Zelensky gave him nothing. And he believes that he still has some papers that he was holding from him. He still has the server. And it basically was the first no that Zelensky has given to Trump.

It's interesting you point out that, as you say, the impeachment proceedings started quite soon in

In August, a whistleblower made a complaint about this call, and then in September, it started leaking out to the press. But I saw some reporting in The New York Times that Zelensky had made plans to announce an investigation into the Bidens on CNN, but was able to cancel it in advance because Trump released the military aid. Well, I think that that is right, that Trump could only do so much, given that there were still adults in the room in the White House who...

who were providing some guardrails to how much actually Trump can bully Ukraine. So impeachment proceedings begin. The Democrats basically argue that Trump has asked another country to dig up dirt on arrival and that it could have helped him win the 2020 election, which is illegal. Trump continues to say he's done nothing wrong, but things escalate. In September, impeachment proceedings begin. How is Zelensky dealing with this whole situation at home?

It was, I think, a quite big shock for Zelensky. First, that this call was made public. This is not something that happens often, we do know, right, in the media and in think tank community. It's rarely that these kinds of documents are declassified and so quickly put on the internet for wider public.

He understood the dangerous waters he is treading with Trump, how in a way dangerous it is for Ukraine to be drawn into U.S. domestic politics without much benefit to it, to be honest.

And there was that awkward meeting also between Trump and Zelensky in the White House, where you could see he was sitting very, you know, slouch in this chair, not finding the right words. It was, I think, his first serious international mistake that he made. I don't think he handled it very well. And in Ukraine, people were shocked about how the United States is treating

countries in Europe, including Ukraine, with little dignity and with a lot of pressure. And the language that Trump used, we are now only getting used to it. But back then in 2019, a lot of people were shocked to this kind of naked exposure of Trump's vocabulary. The impeachment proceedings

failed in the end. The Democrat-held House of Representatives did manage to impeach him on two charges, abuse of power and the obstruction of Congress. But the Republican-controlled Senate narrowly cleared him on both charges. How do you think that whole affair affected the Trump and Zelensky relationship? I think it has been quite an emotional roller coaster on both sides. I think at the beginning, Trump and Zelensky

thought that they are quite similar and that they could find a common ground. You know, both of them coming out of the system, both of them television celebrities, both of them came to fix their country, kind of speaking, not this bureaucratic, politically correct speak, but being out there in a quite populist manner, campaigning. And maybe even Trump saw young Zelensky as his own mirror image.

But then, of course, it all unraveled because Trump wanted to use a smaller country to its own advantage. And this toxicity of U.S. domestic politics got in the way of it. So I think this was a big problem.

I think it was a traumatic experience, especially for Zelensky, much less for Trump. But it irritated Trump that because of this Ukraine, his presidency has to go through this embarrassing impeachment. And again, he has to defend himself.

having won the elections, what he believes, you know, clear and square. And he felt insulted that Ukraine was contributing to a democratic narrative. Do they have any more dealings in the years while Trump is out of power?

There wasn't much contact. I think Ukrainians had a couple of lobbying companies working in Washington, especially when the campaign started again. But there was not much going on, unlike now we know calls between Trump and Putin, Musk and Putin. I think the

phone line to Russia was much more active than to Ukraine, until of course Trump became more active already in his own campaign. But it was quite calm. What was the feeling in Kyiv when Trump won the election in 2024?

I'd say it was a mixture of anxiety and hope at the beginning. To be honest, Ukrainians were quite tired of Biden's lack of strategy. And here they agreed with the criticism of Republicans of the Democrat White House approach to the war in Ukraine. And they probably secretly hoped that Trump can indeed achieve this peace through strength.

where they would put more pressure on Kremlin, where the unpredictable Trump would be a risky partner for Putin, and he may think that he will cut losses and end the war. There was that mixture of feelings and, of course, anxiety because they saw how Zelensky visited this munition plant in Pennsylvania, how brutally they attacked,

Ukrainian ambassador and how they almost refused to meet Zelensky when he went on that tour before elections. And Trump kind of almost again demanded apologies that Zelensky interfered into electoral campaign. So we see this narrative again, Ukrainian election interference haunting Trump, and he's persuaded that Ukrainians don't want him and they prefer to work with the Democrats.

I guess the key question, and we're not going to rehash the events over the last few weeks, I think we're all pretty familiar with it now. How much do you think this history has informed and affected what we've seen in terms of both Zelensky reacting to Trump and Trump reacting to Zelensky? I think a lot. And I think Ukraine is a reflection of how Trump deals with Ukraine is a reflection of his worldview.

He thinks, of course, that the great powers can do what they want and the small powers like Ukraine

must suffer what they should. Zelensky was trying to present Ukraine as a partner for the United States. Almost, he's very sensitive to the changed rhetoric in the White House. You could see how after Trump was elected, he immediately changed the narrative about this war from this confrontation between democracies and autocracies to more liberty, to more

American national interest in Ukraine to transactionalism. But that didn't play a trick. Trump doesn't need Ukraine as a partner and doesn't feel obliged to help Ukraine. So it is an impossible task for Ukraine on its own to really get U.S. as a serious ally in its war with Russia. Do you think Donald Trump hates Zelensky?

I think he is irritated by him. I think he probably thinks he is quite charismatic and he tries to, as I say, play a bit his game and he doesn't give Trump an upper hand because he understands the strategy.

I think Zelensky also relaxed a bit into believing that he has a good relationship with Trump because several times, especially in his last visit before elections, he managed to get that meeting and he saw that they could do business. He saw that this transactional nature will take upper hand, but trust was never there. And we could see how now there's a public show of mistrust and even insults.

that Trump is showering on Zelensky in public. Can Zelensky still win Trump round, do you think? You know, I don't think so. I think we're all struggling to win United States in Europe on our side, to stand for what Ukrainians and Europeans want United States to be, to uphold respect to basic principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty. I think fundamentally Trump has a problem with sovereignty.

He, like Putin, believes some countries should have limited sovereignty. So this is where the conflict is, systemic conflict that no personal relationship can fix. This is where the clash between Zelensky and Trump is. They do have genuinely different mindsets. Arisia Litsevich from Chatham House, thank you very much for joining us on Battle Lines. Good to be with you.

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It's a knotty old tale with a lot of unknowns, I have to be honest, but we're going to do our best. Here with me to walk us through it all is my co-host Roland Oliphant, who lived and worked in Russia for a decade between 2006 and 2016. So, Roland, let's start with Trump's first ever trip to Russia way back in 1987 when it was the Soviet Union. So, 1987, getting to the end of the Soviet period, Russia's new Soviet Union's just beginning to open up.

Donald Trump and his first wife Ivana go on a trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Some people say at the invitation of the mayor of Moscow, he was meant to be scouting out locations for luxury hotels. Nothing came of that in the end. He decided for whatever reason that maybe the Russians weren't reliable partners.

So he's been going there for a long time. He has a relationship with the country. But this trip keeps on coming up because there have been various claims that this trip was either organized by the KGB, which would not be at all out of

the ordinary in that case and that they they made an approach or they tried to work out if they could use them as an asset of course perfectly believable stuff the more interesting thing i think on that ship came from a guy called yuri schwartz who was a kgb major he was a partner of after the fourth soviet union a partner of alexander lipanyenko the uh the guy who was poisoned with palladium in london anyway he made the claim a couple of years ago he he said look on this trip

Trump was definitely attended to by KGB agents. He probably wouldn't have known it. And that he was fed Russian talking points, flattered, and that it all came within the context of a moment when the KGB was trying to

find other ways of getting to potential sources or potential assets in the West that a young up-and-coming businessman might be that. I mean, I must say, no one's verified that claim, but that is perfectly in keeping run-of-the-mill for kind of the KGB approach to foreigners passing through

the Soviet Union at that time in history. So Trump comes back to America and he takes out several full-page adverts in American newspapers and they express, among other things, scepticism about US participation in NATO. Quite bizarre talking points.

People have used that to suggest that he might have been recruited, right? The claim is from Shvets that that's taken back in Moscow at KGB headquarters on Ljubljana as a massive win. Wow, it worked. We wined him, we dined him, we flattered him, we identified his psychological weak points and he's gone back and he's literally repeated everything we gave him. Again, not confirmed. I mean, the KGB, Russian security services have this

very well developed tradition, a very technical kind of approach to the idea of identifying individuals' weaknesses using flattery, using ways to manipulate people. And I think the important thing to get in here for due diligence is the target of that may have no idea that he's being manipulated in that way. So even if that is true, even if the champagne corks popped in Moscow when they saw that, that doesn't necessarily mean that Donald Trump had

had been actively recruited and knew he was working for the KGB at all. And there are lots of cases of that in history. I mean, he wouldn't stand out in that respect. OK, so the Soviet Union falls in 1991. What happens in terms of Donald Trump's business interests in Russia over the next decade or so? So it's quite curious. I mean, he doesn't really get back into Russia, but there's a period in the kind of 2000s when he's definitely doing...

business with Russia and other kind of former Soviet businessmen. There's a moment in 2008 when Kommersant, which is the kind of big Russian business broadsheet, reported that Donald Trump had considered working on renovating the Moskva Hotel and the Rossiya Hotel. Now, the Moskva was eventually rebuilt, the Rossiya. So the Rossiya Hotel was this

monstrosity of a thing right next to the Kremlin in central Moscow. It was absolutely enormous. It was where kind of foreigners had to stay in the Soviet Union. It was pretty derelict. It was a notorious place. Eventually they demolished it and they built a park there finally after the lot stood empty for a long time in central Moscow. A very nice park. But the point is

That question of who's going to renovate the Rossiya Hotel was for a while in Moscow a really big question. So again, something that they might have considered or not. And Donald Trump Jr. is also on record kind of around about this time talking about how like in the New York property market, they've got a lot of customers from Russia. They've got a lot of money coming in from Russia. So he's dealing with people and so on. The claim's been made that he was in financial trouble at this point and he found partners in Russia to get him through this period.

So Vladimir Putin is in power by now. He becomes president in 1999. Let's fast forward to 2013, which is when Donald Trump Sr., the man himself, goes out to Russia with his Miss Universe pageant. Why was this trip significant? So, yes, 2013, so before 2014, before the invasion of Ukraine, before things really start going sour, Trump is running Miss Universe at this point, and he's basically persuaded to bring it to Russia by this...

these two very rich guys, Aras and Emin Agalarov. Aras is the father, Emin is the son. They are extremely rich Moscow property developers. And one of their big properties is Crocus City Hall, which listeners may recall is tragically the site of the horrible terrorist attack

It's a huge concert hall and this conference center. Anyway, these guys met him and persuaded him he should have Miss Universe next at Crocus City Hall. And it happened very quickly. Donald Trump had a great time. He was tweeting a lot. He was saying, well, Vladimir Putin come. Vladimir Putin didn't go to Miss Universe, strangely enough.

But he made a big thing of having a great time. And we should also add that he gave quite a telling interview to MSNBC on that trip. And this is speaking to MSNBC's Thomas Roberts. He was asked whether he had a relationship with Vladimir Putin. And he replied, I do have a relationship. And I think it's very interesting to see what's happened. I mean, look, he's done a very brilliant job in terms of what he represents and who he's representing. He's done brilliantly.

an amazing job. He's put himself really as, you know, a lot of people would say he's put himself at the forefront of the world as a leader in a short period of time. Now, in all fairness to Obama, I think that he's done the same thing with Bush, with President Bush. I think that Putin has done an amazing job of showing certain leadership that our people have not been able to match. You're already seeing that kind of affection and admiration for Vladimir Putin there. Remember, though, even though it's before the invasion of Ukraine...

Things aren't going too well in American relations. Edward Snowden is just showing up. And he was actually tweeting. Donald Trump tweeted out, Edward Snowden, you're not invited. That was a really tense point in American politics.

And the other thing, of course, at the time was there was Syria and chemical weapons and so on. But there was also Vladimir Putin had basically taken a turn to the right culturally towards conservatives and partly in response to this big middle class protest movement against him a couple of years earlier in 2011. And as part of that, he passed a law that became known as the Gay Propaganda Law.

which basically said, banned the promotion of homosexuality to children. And that became a massive, that was a massive issue in the West. People criticised him a lot for it. There was a lot of reporting about homophobia, about

crackdowns on civil liberties. And in fact, the openly gay director of Miss Universe said he couldn't go. He bowed out at this point. So there are all these things going on, which are creating kind of thorns in the side of American and Russian relations. So that's the context in which he goes in there. And yes, as you say, he is already showing this admiration for Vladimir Putin, this approval of him.

So 2016, Donald Trump is elected as president and then things start to get really knotty. There are instant allegations of Russian interference in the election. Walk us through what we know about that period now and Russia's involvement. OK, so what we do know, as you say, massive allegations of Russian involvement in the elections, ranging from the Steele dossier, which is this report put together by a retired British spy called Christopher Steele, who's contracted...

basically to dig up any kind of connections between Donald Trump and Russia. He came up with a report with all kinds of lurid allegations in it, which was then kind of, he kind of passed it around journalists in Washington, hoping that they'd be able to stand it up. BuzzFeed News eventually was saying, let's just publish it. No one's getting anywhere with this. So it all came out that it basically had the claim that the president of the United States, or the soon to be elected president of the United States, is a Russian asset.

and has been run by the KGB for 40 years or so on and so forth. That was a pretty explosive claim. That's never substantiated, but there is an investigation into Russian interference in the election, nonetheless, run by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, and that concludes that, yes, the Russians had made great efforts to disrupt the 2016 US presidential election in favor of Trump, but there was no evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russians, so it was not in his knowledge. There was no collusion at all

Everybody knows it. The key point here is in October, the month before the election, the leaking of these emails from the Democrat National Convention, which seriously damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign. The US intelligence community assessment was that

those were stolen and leaked by the Russians. They also said that we can't say that Trump knew anything about that or was linked to it in any way. So it feels like there's a sort of theme developing here in that Trump and his talking points have certainly been useful for Russia, but there's never been any substantiated evidence that Trump is working on behalf of Russia. It has so far just played to Russia's advantage. Right. So it's always been noted that Donald Trump

a world view with Vladimir Putin. He's been very clear about that. He obviously admires Vladimir Putin. He says that he gets on well with him personally. There is certainly a rapport there and a mutual kind of political alignment of views. Now, that has led to the suggestion that

there is something deeper in the relationship here. He comes back to the rhetorical question of why on earth does Donald Trump apparently never criticize Vladimir Putin? What is it? What could be the possible explanation? One explanation that some people jumped on was, ah, he must be working for the Russians. They must have compromised on him. He must be a KGB plant or something like that. I personally don't see, I just, that's a big allegation.

And if you apply Occam's razor, the old principle, is there a simpler explanation? Well, yes, there is. I lived in Moscow in those kind of boom years and post-boom, the high Putin years. For a long time, it was never difficult to find a certain kind of Western businessman, often Americans, but not just Americans, who just quite liked Vladimir Putin.

and admired his way of doing things. And because they'd been to Russia a few times, felt like they understood the place and got the talking points and talked to lots of Russians and absorbed what they said.

and get that worldview. So it's not to me incredibly implausible that Donald Trump is just one of those people who happens to have that kind of view of the world. The final point in this sort of history that I'd like to get to is 2018. There's a Russia-US summit in Helsinki. It's the first time that we see Putin and Trump next to each other.

They hold two hours of closed-door talks, and then they hold a press conference together. What do they say? Yes, exactly. So he's in Helsinki, and this question of the Mwela report, the Russian interference...

in the elections is raised and American intelligence services have said the Russians were behind this, they leaked Hillary's emails and he's asked about it, did he confront him about this? Trump's asked this about this at the press conference alongside Vladimir Putin. He says, "My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia.

I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be. I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And you saw his chief Russia adviser, Fiona Hill, burying her head in her hands at this point.

It was a shocking moment because it was basically a U.S. president apparently taking the word of the Russian president over his own intelligence services, which was like crazy. Now, he did correct himself later. He later put out a statement where he said, I do have complete faith in American intelligence services. And I meant to say, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be. I just spoke on that word.

So he corrected himself. Yeah, that Helsinki meeting really was extraordinary. Earlier this week, our sister podcast, The Daily Tea, interviewed Michael Wolff, who's the journalist behind Fire and Fury, that famous book about Trump's first term. Michael Wolff, he mentioned that Helsinki meeting. Let's hear a clip. When Trump and Putin met in Helsinki, I sat with Steve Bannon,

and watching that news conference with Bannon trying to figure out what does Putin have on Donald Trump. One of the gaping holes of our time of the thing that we don't understand

What is the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump? You know, I mean, congressional investigators spent millions trying to unlock this, and they clearly did open a sizable window into a very strange relationship.

probably alarming relationship. That becomes just one part of this dynamic that we now see playing out right now with the whole Ukraine question, which is that why is it that Donald Trump's views and policies seem to align so closely

with Vladimir Putin's. And we can make a big list of it. Zelensky is a dictator. OK, he walked back that back, but that's a Russian line. Ukraine can't join NATO. OK, that's a Russian objective. Ukraine has to be realistic about not getting its land back. OK, well, that's the Russians have always said new realities on the ground. Now he's cut off intelligence sharing.

cut off arms deliveries, all these things that seem to be very much in line with the Kremlin's foreign policy objectives. And now you're seeing people raise this question again. Democrat Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon on Tuesday this week asked a question in a Senate hearing. Is President Trump a Russian asset? Absolutely not, Senator. He's the president of United States duly elected by the American people. Well, the reason I ask is many people back home have been asking me this question.

And they say, if he was an asset, we would see exactly what he's doing now. I can't imagine that if he was a Russian asset, he could do anything more favorable than these five points. What else could a Russian asset actually possibly do that Trump hasn't yet done? So raising that rhetorical question, where is that?

dividing line. So that's where we are right now. What we can say very confidently is that whatever the causes of it, whatever Donald Trump's personal motivations and views on this, he is aligning American foreign policy very closely with the Kremlin's in a way that hasn't been seen probably in history. Thanks very much, Roland. That's Roland Oliphant, my co-host here on Battlelines. And that's all for this week's episode. We'll be back again on Monday. Until then, goodbye.

Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave us a review as it helps others find the show. To stay on top of all of our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes.

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