Woodward revelations deepen debate on whether Trump will sell out Ukraine to Kremlin

As the Nov. 5 presidential election in the U.S. approaches, debate is intensifying over whether one of the two potential winners, Donald Trump, will act in the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Although discussions on the topic have raged since Trump’s first presidency, they accelerated this week after fresh revelations in U.S. journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” were cited by U.S. media. The book will hit bookshelves next week.
Trump has spoken with Putin seven times since leaving office in 2021, according to an unnamed aide cited by Woodward.
The book also claims Trump secretly sent Abbott Covid testing machines to Putin during his first term as president when the devices were scarce.
If true, the new information exposes a deeper side of the controversial relationship between Trump and Putin, prompting critics of the ex-president seeking re-election this autumn to accuse him of selling out both U.S. and Ukrainian interests to the Kremlin.
The revelations fit in with Trump’s track record of praising Putin and seeking a friendlier relationship with Russia. Analysts say that Trump likes Putin because he views himself along with the Russian leader as “strongmen.”
But other facts in Trump’s previous relations with Putin may indicate that a “sellout” of U.S. and Ukrainian interests is not inevitable. During Trump’s presidency from 2017 to 2021, the U.S. began supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine, and killed Russian mercenaries in Syria.
Trump’s election campaign has slammed the book’s claims, saying in a statement that “none of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true,” accusing Woodward of bias.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Covid tests had been sent, but denied the book’s claim that Trump and Putin had spoken by phone several times since the U.S. politician left office.
“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Peskov said, adding: “But about the phone calls — it’s not true.”
“Surprise Surprise! Isn’t that special! Our erstwhile ex-president BFF with the dictator and warmonger Vladimir Putin,” Reno Domenico, head of Democrats Abroad in Ukraine, told the Kyiv Independent.
“This falls somewhere between fraternizing with the enemy and being a Kremlin agent. Do you think the subject of Ukraine’s surrender came up during the phone calls?”
Adrian Karatnycky, a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, said that Woodward’s revelations are “a remarkable indication of long-standing and ongoing links between Putin and Trump.”
“The secrecy around this is as important as the potential content of their discussions,” he told the Kyiv Independent. “It has been reported that some of these discussions occurred well after genocidal attacks on Ukraine, and well after it was clear that Putin was indicted as a war criminal. They occurred as late as 2024.”
Karatnycky argued that “we have all known and suspected that there is a ‘special relationship’ between Trump and Putin but these ongoing discussions and some things Trump has been saying about a quick solution (to Russia’s war against Ukraine) leads one to the conclusion that they may have had preliminary discussions about what I would call a sellout of Ukraine.”
Speculation looms, even in Kyiv, on how reliable the new information presented by Woodward is.
Woodward’s report was based on only one source, and no other sources have confirmed it. Twenty current and former Trump and Biden administration officials and career intelligence officials reached by The New York Times said they had no knowledge of any contacts between Trump and Putin in the years since Trump left office.
Although Woodward conducted 20 interviews with Trump from 2016 to 2020 for his previous books, the Trump campaign said he was not given any access for “War.”
“The main question is the source,” Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Independent. “Where did he take this information? It’s just a rumor.”
Fesenko, a regular talking head on Ukrainian state television which is controlled by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration during martial law, added that Woodward was not a neutral source since he had consistently supported the Democrats.
He added, however, that there is no doubt that Trump has a soft spot for Putin, and “this has been known for a long time.”
“Trump sympathizes with strong leaders,” he said. “He is susceptible to flattery, and Putin takes advantage of this.”
Russian political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said that “Putin and Trump are cut from the same political cloth.”
“They are authoritarian leaders, strongmen,” he told the Kyiv Independent.
“Trump and Putin are two of a kind; they understand each other instinctively. For Putin, it’s more convenient to negotiate with Trump (than with Biden or Harris),” he added. His comment refers to outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden, and his Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party candidate squaring off with Trump for the presidency in the upcoming election.
Trump has repeatedly backed and praised Putin and rarely criticized him.
In 2018 Trump accepted Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Trump also described Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy” in 2022.
Additionally, there are well-documented links between Trump’s team and the Kremlin.
In 2015 Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was paid $45,000 to deliver a Moscow speech at an anniversary celebration of RT, a Kremlin-controlled TV network, where he sat next to Putin at his banquet table.
Flynn also repeatedly met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. In 2017, Flynn reached a deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to plead guilty to a felony count of making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigations about his contacts with Kislyak.
The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2020 that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” by creating opportunities for “Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on the Trump campaign.”
During Trump’s presidency, the directors of Russia’s three main intelligence and security agencies (FSB, SVR, and GRU) also paid an unusual visit to Washington D.C. and met with top U.S. security officials. Two of them were on the U.S. sanctions list.
The Mueller special counsel investigation concluded in 2019 that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to favor Trump. However, the investigation found no evidence that Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s 2016 election interference.
In the run-up to this autumn’s presidential election, Trump has faced accusations that he was willing to push Ukraine to conclude a peace deal with Russia on Putin’s terms.
He said in 2023 that, if elected president again, he would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to make a peace deal, ending Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Trump also said he would warn Putin that the U.S. would increase military support for Ukraine if an agreement is not reached. But two Trump advisors have proposed a plan that would cease military aid to Ukraine unless it agrees to hold peace negotiations with Russia instead of continuing to push back in an existential war, Reuters reported in June.
Despite the Trump team’s alleged links with the Kremlin, some observers, including Fesenko, argue that U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated during Trump’s presidency from 2017 through 2021.
Fesenko said that “Trump sincerely wanted to reach a deal with Putin” and improve relations between the two countries, but “Putin didn’t make any concessions to Trump.”
He also pointed to the Trump administration’s 2017 decision to start supplying lethal weapons, namely Javelin anti-tank missiles, to Ukraine as a sign of worsening relations with the Kremlin.
Despite the supply of Javelins, in 2019 Trump withheld military aid and an invitation to the White House from Zelensky in order to influence Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump’s political opponent Joe Biden and to promote the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to a Congressional inquiry. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for these actions but acquitted by the Senate.
Trump’s supporters in Congress also blocked $61 billion U.S. military aid from October 2023 until April 2024.
Domenico dismissed the argument that Trump’s relations with Putin deteriorated.
“The story about Javelins is the only thing they can point to,” he said. “And the Javelins only came because Trump was caught in the impeachment scandal at the time, and had to act like he was doing something.”
He added that “when the ambassador and (Russian Foreign Minister Sergei) Lavrov were in the White House in January 2017, laughing and joking, everything looked hunky-dory to me between Russia and Donald Trump.”
Another low in U.S.-Russian relations came in 2018, when the U.S. and their allies killed dozens of Syrian troops, and an unknown number of Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in the Battle of Hasham in Syria.
In 2018, Trump even went so far as to directly criticize Putin, saying he was responsible for his ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s chemical attacks.
“President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad,” he said.
Under Trump, the U.S. government also imposed sanctions against Russian companies and the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
The U.S. also expelled sixty Russian diplomats following the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the U.K. in 2018. The U.K. government accused the Kremlin of organizing the assassination attempt.