Just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. president-elect Donald Trump spoke for the first time since the election, Russia launched a major offensive across Syria on Tuesday after weeks of relative quiet.
With the transition between President Barack Obama and Trump now underway, Russia experts and former intelligence community officials told The Cipher Brief they will be closely watching the Kremlin’s moves to see what steps Putin will take to consolidate his gains and achieve his foreign policy goals in the next two months and the early days of Trump’s presidency.
Regardless of who would have been elected, the next two months were always going to be a “reasonably dangerous” period, Hudson Institute research fellow Hannah Thoburn said.
“It’s a great opportunity for Putin to, if he wants, start pushing to see where he can get movement and to see where you’re going to get pushback from either the current president or the future president,” she said.
During the transition period, the Russian response will likely be to “try and consolidate as many gains or facts on the ground, whether in Syria, Ukraine or elsewhere, as possible to be in a stronger position to negotiate with the new administration,” Jeffrey Mankoff, deputy director and senior fellow with the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program, said.
And in the early months of Trump’s presidency, Russia observers expect the Kremlin will look to play on the president-elect’s favorable view of the country to push for the U.S. to roll back sanctions and move toward Moscow’s position on Syria and President Bashar al-Assad. In the long-term, the Russian government will also likely focus efforts on fulfilling one of Putin’s core interests: to encourage a U.S., under Trump, to abandon Ukraine and let Russia's sphere of influence grow in Eastern Europe.
If the U.S.-Russia relationship shifts with a Trump presidency, it will not be Moscow that alters its foreign policy, but Washington, according to the Russia experts who spoke to The Cipher Brief.
“We’ve already seen Putin congratulating him and continuing that charm offensive. I think that will probably continue during this period and probably into the first months of the Trump presidency,” Michael Sulick, former director of CIA's National Clandestine Service and a Russia expert, said. “But I don’t think anybody should be under any illusions. Putin isn’t about to change his foreign policy goals because he publicly hopes relations improve with Trump.”
As Thoburn said, “The only one who would be changing here would be the United States — not Russia.”
Trump and Putin spoke on the phone Monday, agreeing on the need to "normalize" relations, according to a readout from the Kremlin. While the Trump team’s report on the conversation did not refer to Syria, the Russians noted that “both spoke of the need to work together in the struggle against the number one common enemy – international terrorism and extremism. In this context, they discussed issues related to solving the crisis in Syria.”
On Tuesday, Russia announced it had launched a major offensive in Syria and airstrikes resumed for the first time in weeks in the rebel-held eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo.
Trump has repeatedly praised Putin and made several statements during the election supporting Kremlin policy. He said the U.S. would only defend NATO countries, which may feel threatened by Russia, if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us” and that he would “be looking at” recognizing Crimea as a part of Russia and lifting sanctions imposed after the 2014 annexation.
“That’s the kind of stuff that really says to the rest of the world that the post-1945 world order is over, the U.S. is no longer going to play by the rules we helped set up after WWII, and that this is a totally different world,” Thoburn said. “I’m afraid that would set off a kind of period of pushing and shoving between different large and medium powers to figure out who gets what. I think that’s what concerns me the most, this period of uncertainty where we don’t know what American leadership is going to be, what it will look like, or if it is really going to even be there.”
Top members of Trump’s campaign and transition team have ties to Russian business or political interests. Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a vice chair of the Trump transition team, has appeared on Russian state-owned English-language RT as an analyst and in 2015 attended a gala dinner for the network in Moscow.
Flynn told The Washington Post this summer that his view on the potential for the U.S.-Russia relationship is that “we have a problem with radical Islamism and I actually think that we could work together with them against this enemy. They have a worse problem than we do.” But he also told NBC during an interview in August that Trump understands the Russians “have a view of the United States that is not in our best interests.”
Ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort previously worked as a consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Putin-backed president of Ukraine who was ousted in 2014, while former foreign policy adviser Carter Page holds a financial stake in state-controlled Russian energy company Gazprom and has previously consulted for the conglomerate.
As for Trump’s own business interests in the country, the president-elect has not released any tax returns. However, he did bring the Miss Universe competition to Moscow in 2013, and Trump’s son and member of his transition team, Donald Jr, told a real estate conference in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Meanwhile, over the course of the campaign, the Russian government suspended key arms control agreements with the U.S., was officially accused by the U.S. intelligence community of intending to interfere with the election process by directing the hacks targeting the Democratic Party, and its state-owned media aggressively pushed Trump’s candidacy and sought to call into question the legitimacy of the election in order to undermine the image of U.S. democracy around the world.
And just after the election results came in, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said “there were contacts” with the Trump campaign during the race. “Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” he said, according to the state-run Interfax news agency. The Trump team denied having any contact with Russian officials before the election.
“One of Putin’s goals is that Russia is recognized as the equivalent superpower with the U.S. And he’s accomplished that during the campaign. Here he’s a major topic at debates because of his embrace of Trump, the DNC hacking issues, and this is another one in line with that,” Sulick noted.
The Russians are “probably sort of dazzled a bit with their initial success on this” election, Steven Hall, a former senior CIA officer who retired in 2015 and spent much of his career overseeing intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact.
And although new U.S. presidents tend to believe under their watch that it’s “going to be a different ballgame with Russia,” Hall said that is a Western response based on a lack of understanding of Moscow and an inclination by politicians to believe in their own individual power following a successful campaign. “But Putin, being an old case officer, he sees these as motivations and vulnerabilities and knows precisely how to act on them,” Hall noted.
Just look at his past efforts with new U.S. presidents: in President George W. Bush’s first meeting with Putin in 2001, Bush came away saying that “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straight-forward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul,” while early on Obama attempted an optimistic “reset” with Russia before relations deteriorated. During Obama’s presidency, Russia has intervened militarily in Ukraine and Syria, annexing Crimea and supporting Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
Those close to the president-elect, however, say Trump’s goal of engaging with Putin for warmer relations with Russia makes sense. Rudy Giuliani, who has been mentioned for a number of roles in Trump’s cabinet including secretary of state, said on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “it is true that I think Donald Trump wants to engage Russia in areas where we can work together in a way that Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and Barack Obama failed to do.”
The former New York City mayor also told The Wall Street Journal at a Monday event that "Russia thinks it's a military competitor, it really isn't. It's our unwillingness under Obama to even threaten the use of our military that makes Russia so powerful."
While Putin and Trump have exchanged praise and pleasantries recently, that may not last given their similar personalities, according to experts. Both Putin and Trump have an “instinct where they want to push back when they feel they have been disrespected, and they keep a kind of list of grudges,” Thoburn noted.
“While I think they’ll try and make nice, at least at the beginning, there’s definitely the possibility sometime down the road” that an unexpected event “could lead to a blowup at some point,” Thoburn said.
And Sulick said he expects Putin will likely “proceed very cautiously” with a Trump presidency, even as he takes steps to advance his core interests, but eventually the Russian president will go too far.
“I think he’ll probably take advantage of the fact that the new administration is trying to assemble its team and establish its own foreign policy goals,” Sulick said. “But everybody always portrays Putin as this incredibly wily genius, always outmaneuvering the Americans at every turn, but he doesn’t understand America that well. I think that he will overreach at some point. I just think it’s inevitable that he’ll take some adversarial step that he thinks he can get away with that will require some kind of response from the U.S. side from the new administration.”
With a Trump presidency, “the inclination seems to be to retrench, to pull back, to question the value of longstanding U.S. alliances — that is all very much music to Russian ears. The question, of course, is what is it actually going to mean in practical terms?” Mankoff said.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
