President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin appear to have had more sustained contact with each other in the past two weeks than at any time since 2016, as the Kremlin tries to use the coronavirus pandemic and close personal ties between the two leaders to normalize long-strained relations with Washington.
The two leaders spoke on the phone at least four times over a two-week period, beginning March 30 and ending on Sunday, a record pace for publicly known phone calls between the leaders, according to a CNN tally.
Official readouts of their conversations indicate the leaders discussed the coronavirus pandemic and a price war that destabilized the oil markets. The flurry of phone calls follow a Kremlin campaign urging US-Russia cooperation against the coronavirus that used news outlets Trump follows, said Andrew Weiss, a vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The calls have taken place as both Trump and Putin face domestic political challenges and offer the embattled leaders a way to claim wins. But analysts such as Weiss warn that Putin’s outreach involves risks to the US.
‘An end run’
“Reaching out to the United States … is part of part of Putin’s long-term plan to basically undermine the credibility of the United States as an important stalwart player in the global system, to undermine our alliances, and then to create as many lasting sources of tension between Donald Trump and his own national security team,” Weiss told CNN. “The more that Russia succeeds in doing that, the less pressure Russia itself is likely to face from a unified western camp.”
Putin’s appeal to Trump is meant to be an “end run around the US national security bureaucracy, the State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community,” which are far more distrustful of Moscow than the President is, Weiss said.
US-Russia relations have been complex since Trump became president. Though his relationship with Putin has been warm, Washington has slapped Moscow with tough sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine, interference in the 2016 election, other malicious cyber activities, human rights abuses, use of a chemical weapon, weapons proliferation, illicit trade with North Korea, and its support for Syria and Venezuela.
Tensions occasionally spill outside the political realm.
On Wednesday, the US Navy said a Russian Su-35 jet performed an “unsafe” intercept of a US P-8 surveillance aircraft while it was flying in international airspace over the Mediterranean Sea., putting US pilots and crew at risk.
The same day, Russia conducted a test of an anti-satellite missile that Space Command commander Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond said, provides “further proof of Russia’s hypocritical advocacy of outer space arms control proposals designed to restrict the capabilities of the United States while clearly having no intention of halting their counterspace weapons programs.”
The tension has impeded cooperation on a number of fronts, including any progress on Americans detained by the Russians and the extension of the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, New START, which expires in February 2021.
On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov that any renewal of the New START Treaty will have to include China, a condition that is widely seen as a way to scuttle the deal and lay the blame on Beijing. China has a much smaller nuclear arsenal than either the US or Russia and has no incentive to sign on to a pact that curbs its arsenal at levels far below its geopolitical rivals.
And Congress is now readying still more sanctions, including a bill targeting Russia’s oil sector and other legislation meant to punish ongoing and future election interference.
But Trump’s stance toward Moscow has been much less hostile than that of Congress and some members of his administration.
Putin “has basically shown the rest of the US government that their views on Russia don’t matter, that he has direct access to the US president.”