“It didn’t seem to me like anyone else cared, other than us,” Trump said in an interview then with The New York Times, his first lengthy description of what his foreign policy would look like if he was elected. The United States, he said, was “the least affected by what happens with Ukraine because we’re the farthest away.” And countries that were closer — Germany, for example — did not seem to care much.

His argument took on a new relevance Thursday, after his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the state of the negotiations over the real estate project’s fate. If Cohen’s latest version of events is proved true, Trump was publicly offering a conciliatory and possibly self-interested policy gesture to Moscow as he continued to seek a business deal that would require the Kremlin’s blessing.

There is little doubt that Putin was listening. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a land grab by Putin of Ukrainian territory that had once been part of the Soviet Union and before that part of pre-revolutionary Russia. And it was a power grab for the Russian leader, one that led to sanctions from Washington and most of the European allies.

March 2016 was also when Trump brought into his campaign Paul Manafort, the longtime Republican lobbyist and strategist who had made millions of dollars advising and lobbying on behalf of the pro-Russia leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort became the campaign’s chairman several months later.

The annexation of Crimea hardened anti-Putin sentiment among most Republicans. But from the start of his campaign in mid-2015, several months before prosecutors say his company began considering a deal in Russia, Trump departed from the normal Republican hard line about Russia, attacking President Barack Obama’s approach because it alienated a potential partner.

“I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin,” Trump said soon after announcing his run for the presidency. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”

It was an unusual argument for a Republican candidate; the party had been instinctively anti-Soviet during the Cold War and deeply suspicious of Putin thereafter. So Trump’s position that sanctions were counterproductive — and harmed American interests — stood out from the start of the campaign, prompting many to question whether his interest in selling properties to rich Russians seeking to park their assets in the United States, or his efforts to build the tower in Moscow, explained his position.

He was pressed on the issue on March 25, 2016, after he agreed to a lengthy interview with The Times on his foreign policy views.

Trump began with his now-familiar complaints about NATO, and his contention — which echoed arguments made by Obama before him — that the United States pays too much of the defense burden compared with its European partners.

But Trump quickly veered into the effort to protect Ukraine, which is not a NATO member. “Now I’m all for Ukraine, I have friends that live in Ukraine,” he began, as he built his case that the United States was more concerned about Putin’s effort to dismember the country than the Europeans were.

“And I said to myself, isn’t that interesting? We’re fighting for the Ukraine, but nobody else is fighting for the Ukraine other than the Ukraine itself, of course.” Trump said that “it doesn’t seem fair and it doesn’t seem logical.”

At that point, Trump appeared on his way to securing the nomination, but he had not yet secured it. And, as became clear months later, hackers associated with Russia’s military intelligence arm, formerly known as the GRU, were becoming much more aggressive.

Just days before Trump’s comments to The Times, the intelligence unit had downloaded the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and they were burrowing into the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, whose emails they later made public. There is no evidence Trump was aware of any of that activity at the time.

As the campaign went on, his pro-Russia line continued. A proposal to support lethal aid to Ukraine in the Republican platform — something that would ordinarily be uncontroversial — was stripped out of the document before the Republican convention. In the end, all talk of supplying weapons was removed and replaced with a call to provide “appropriate assistance.”

Trump later said he had nothing to do with watering down the language. “I wasn’t involved in that,” he said.

After his election, his national security adviser-designate, Michael Flynn, engaged in conversations — which he later denied having — with the Russian ambassador about reversing other sanctions against Russia, imposed by Obama in retaliation for its efforts to influence the 2016 election. Flynn was forced to resign after it was revealed he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his conversations.

It is not clear that investigators and prosecutors can establish a link between Trump’s policy position on Russia and his economic interest in closing a deal there. The president could argue that his different approach to dealing with Moscow was unrelated to his economic interests, and was shared by some Russia experts who saw the Obama approach, of escalating sanctions, as a failure.

But the plea by Cohen on Thursday increased the possibility that prosecutors could develop a theory as to why Trump’s views of Russia contrasted so sharply with his party’s, and why, in his first two years in office, he often seemed loath to criticize Putin for election interference, human rights violations or his threatening military posture toward Europe.

On Thursday morning, shortly after Cohen’s plea, Trump canceled a meeting with Putin scheduled for this weekend in Argentina, citing the Russian leader’s failure to return Ukrainian ships or crew members seized near Crimea. He did not square that with his earlier position that the United States is far from the conflict, and should not get overly upset with the seizure of Crimea itself.

The New York Times

David E. Sanger © 2018 The New York Times