In the fiery clash between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it was a sentence that went largely unnoticed, but said quite a lot about the closeness the US leader thinks he has with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
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“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said on February 28 in the unprecedented and very public Oval Office clash.
“He went through a phoney witch hunt,” Trump added, referring to an investigation during his first term into whether his 2016 election campaign colluded with Moscow.
Even though that allegation was repeatedly denied by the Kremlin, the Republican president seems now to be saying the incident forged a sense of solidarity between the leaders.
The day before, in talks with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said he believed Putin would “keep his word,” adding: “I spoke to him, I’ve known him for a long time now.”
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For Sasha de Vogel, the associate director of the Authoritarian Politics Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Trump “sees Putin as almost an aspirational figure.”