Trump’s past commercial ties with Russia are pretty widely known – Google ‘Trump’s relationship with Russia’ if you’re not currently aware of them. He has clearly never been as brilliant a ‘deal maker’ as he makes himself out to be, and on at least one occasion had to be rescued from imminent bankruptcy (over a collapsed casino) by Putin-linked Russian banks. Those Google references document several other ways in which Trump might feel financially beholden to Russia; as well as suggesting that Putin also possesses a ‘compromising’ tape of him with a couple of prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. (I won’t go into the unsavoury details.) All of which has even been taken as evidence that he has been a secret Russian agent, no less, since the 1980s; in connection with which however I remember elements in MI5 suspecting Prime Minister Harold Wilson of being a Soviet spy, on the strength of his official visits to the Eastern bloc as President of the Board of Trade in the 1950s. So I’m reluctant to go along with the ‘kompromat’ stories that are supposed to explain Trump’s partiality to Russia fifty years on. That’s the stuff of spy novels. (Though it just might be true!)

But in any case that partiality can be explained without venturing into John Le Carré territory. Firstly, Trump has never shown any sign of being a ‘democrat’, in any sense, and so probably thinks nothing of the ideological divide that is supposed to separate the USA from Russia – or even from the old USSR. For him, ‘democracy’ is simply a game to be played, with few holds barred, and the ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ of it being its only point, irrespective of any principles involved. If he wins, or can be seen as having won, it will accrue prestige to him: which is the second major desideratum in his mind. A third of course is money, either for the USA or for Trump himself, which is why it was that ownership of Ukraine’s precious metals featured so early in his ‘negotiations’ with Russia. A fourth motive – connected with that – is his crude businessman’s view of the world, where everything is seen in terms of ‘deals’, suggesting to him that concessions to Russia constitute the best bargain a deal-maker like him can hope for, in view of the fact that Ukraine, as he brutally told its President, ‘holds none of the cards’. Further: it’s probably true that he does genuinely admire authoritarian dictators: the pre-eminent ‘winners’ in his über-competitive scheme of things; and is working – with his current domestic ‘executive’ measures – to become one himself. And lastly, there’s his crude nationalistic – even proto-fascist – ‘America First’ agenda. That, plus capitalism, and narcissism, probably sum up the man.

By his side, of course, he has his venomous vice-president JD Vance; who has his own reasons for loathing the Western liberal (or ‘wokeish’) values that used to be common to both America and Europe but no longer are, and which chime in with Putin’s deeply reactionary ones. Vance’s recent speeches, largely spun out of social media lies, exemplify this: with the notorious ‘culture wars’ now injected into international diplomacy for (I think) the first time.

All this said, we perhaps shouldn’t dismiss entirely the possibility that Russia might have some right on its side, on the question of Ukraine’s historical and legal status vis-à-vis Russia, and the ‘provocations’ the latter sees as having come from NATO and the EU. At the very least they can help us understand Russia’s nervousness. Foreign relations can rarely be seen in simple black and white terms, especially where ethnically and linguistically mixed populations are involved. Reaching back into history, the Sudeten Germans had a case of sorts in the 1930s, and the Schleswig-Holstein Danes in the 1860s. The same could be said today of Russian-speakers in Dombas and Crimea. This might be a better reason for taking Putin’s side on this question, and that of his new-found buddy Trump. That’s something that future historians are going to have to argue over, when they know how things turn out.

This is no reason for not defending Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression, of course. But a historian of conflict needs to see both sides.