🕷️ Crawler Inspector

URL Lookup

Direct Parameter Lookup

Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 199 (from laksa144)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa199.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical, ml_categories_json AS ml_categories_json, ml_types_json AS ml_types_json, ml_intent_types_json AS ml_intent_types_json, meta_language AS meta_language, attrs_author AS attrs_author, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(attrs_publish_time), 0) AS attrs_publish_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(attrs_original_publish_time), 0) AS attrs_original_publish_time, ifNull(attrs_is_republished, 0) AS attrs_is_republished, ifNull(attrs_nr_words, 0) AS attrs_nr_words, ifNull(attrs_boilerpipe_nr_words, 0) AS attrs_boilerpipe_nr_words, ifNull(body_ext_links_number, 0) AS body_ext_links_number, ifNull(body_int_links_number, 0) AS body_int_links_number, ifNull(meta_nofollow, 0) AS meta_nofollow, ifNull(meta_noarchive, 0) AS meta_noarchive, ifNull(props_was_rendered, 0) AS props_was_rendered, ifNull(src_redirect, \'\') AS src_redirect, ifNull(download_time_msec, 0) AS download_time_msec, ifNull(download_ttfb_msec, 0) AS download_ttfb_msec, ifNull(download_size, 0) AS download_size FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent/\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent/\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent\/","crawl_time":1776380349,"first_indexed_time":1739546023,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"uk,co,telegraph!www,\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent\/ s443","src_root_hash":"4009836203105901399","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"Has Putin turned Trump into an unwitting agent?","meta_descriptions":["The US president’s controversial ties to Russia are once again under close examination as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine"],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"The US president’s controversial ties to Russia are once again under close examination as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine\nEd Cumming\nEd Cumming is a senior feature writer and columnist who started at the Telegraph in 2009, left in 2014 and came back in 2022 after a stint in the Left-wing press.\nSee more\nPublished\n13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT\nAs Russia and the US\nmove to negotiate a peace treaty over Ukraine\n, all eyes are on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two men have seemingly decided to settle things bilaterally; the world’s most nuclear-armed bromance has never felt more consequential.\nIn a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, during which they “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”.\nLater that day, the president told reporters he and Putin would “meet in Saudi Arabia” and that while it was unlikely Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, “some of that land will come back”. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the Russian president agreed with Trump that it was time to work together.\nThe surprise conversation came just hours after a prisoner exchange.\nOn Tuesday, Russia released Marc Fogel\n, an American schoolteacher and former diplomat, who had been serving a 14-year sentence for marijuana possession, in exchange for an unnamed Russian national who had been jailed in the US on money laundering charges.\nSome fear the negotiations are an opportunity for Putin to claim a great victory. In an article for\nThe Telegraph\n, Sir Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary,\nwrote that the talks had “echoes of Nazi appeasement,”\nwhile others have talked of a “betrayal” of Ukraine that will cede swathes of territory to Putin.\nThe latest developments have fuelled a theory among former senior figures in US intelligence that Trump has been unwittingly cultivated by Putin. As far back as 2016, Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, argued that Putin was bringing his experience as a spy to bear on the future American president.\n“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them,” Morell wrote in\nThe New York Times\n. “That is exactly what he did early in the [2016 Republican] primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.”\nIf Putin was trying to make the new US President feel powerful this week, he could hardly have done more. Rather than an international community responding to an unprovoked invasion, the talk around Ukraine this week resembles Yalta or Versailles, with a handful of Great Men carving up the world. It is telling that the\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems hardly to be involved\n, let alone Sir Keir Starmer or the other European leaders. On Thursday, Russia clarified that Ukraine would “of course” take part in any talks, after Zelensky said he would not accept a deal made without Ukraine. But it is clear who is in the driving seat.\nHardball foreign policy realism\nSpeculation about Trump’s relationship with Russia has swirled around him since he entered politics. At the far end of the spectrum is the idea that Trump is irrevocably compromised by secret\nkompromat\n(blackmail collateral) held on him in Russian vaults. Away from the more outlandish conspiracies, the truth may be that Putin has worked out, through experience and cunning, how to push Trump’s buttons and, in so doing, achieve his foreign policy ambitions.\n“There have been lots of accusations that Trump’s a spy, including that\nludicrous Steele dossier\n,” says John Foreman, who was UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022.\n‘Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out,’ says John Foreman, UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022\nCredit\n: AFP\n“Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out. He’s released hostages. Some of his comments about common sense have been picked to resonate with [Trump].”\nAdditionally, he says, Putin flatters Trump’s worldview: “Trump has been reelected and he has a certain way of doing business. It’s hardball foreign policy realism, settling conflict by redrawing maps over the heads of other people using American power. It is pretty much how Putin sees the world as well. Trump spoke about how he got on well with Putin at Helsinki. Personal interaction matters, especially when he doesn’t have much relationship with Zelensky or Starmer.\n“But it goes back to that deeper point about America as a great power, not beholden to the rules-based international order.”\nTrump ‘is naive about who Putin really is’\nTrump has been dogged by speculation about his ties to Russia since he first announced he was running for President, nearly a decade ago. In his pre-political life as a property developer he expressed sporadic interest in property deals in Moscow, before the infamous Miss America pageant in 2013.\nA dossier drawn up by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele (and leaked in 2017) reported\nunsubstantiated allegations that while Trump was staying in Moscow for the pageant, he was filmed with sex workers\n, creating\nkompromat\nthat Russia has been able to use against him since. In January 2017, as Trump took office for the first time, a declassified assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA argued that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process” and damage Hillary Clinton’s credibility.\nSince then, former agents and security officials on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly expressed their fears that Putin has used his KGB training to cultivate Trump. Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and stayed until 1991. Between 1985-1990 he worked undercover in Dresden, where he was a liaison to the Stasi while pretending to be a translator.\nMost recently, last October, Leon Panetta, a former director of the CIA who served as defence secretary under Obama, said that\nTrump had “turned into a source for Putin\n, and somebody who can help him manipulate what he wants to get done”.\n“I think Donald Trump in many ways is naive about who Putin really is,” Panetta told the\nOne Decision\npodcast.\n“[Putin] knows how to work a source and he’s got a source that is very near the top in this country. He, himself is going to engage that source.”\nA charm offensive\nSome have claimed that the influence on Trump goes back even further. Yuri Shvets, a KGB major who was posted to Washington, DC in the 1980s, claimed that the Soviet Union started cultivating Trump more than 40 years ago.\nAmerican Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump\nby journalist Craig Unger claims that the KGB identified Trump as a young businessman on the rise as early as 1977, after he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. Shvets, a source for the book, said that an electronics shop near Trump’s hotel, the Grand Hyatt New York, was really a KGB front. When the Trumps visited Russia for the first time in 1987, KGB operatives flattered Trump and told him he ought to go into politics.\n“It was a charm offensive,” Shvets told\nThe Guardian\n. “They had collected a lot of information on [Trump’s] personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.\n“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called ‘active measures’ soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”\n“Putin will be thrilled to have Trump as a negotiating partner,” Unger adds. “He’s an easy mark, a narcissist. The key is to flatter him. He looks up to Putin.”\nTrump ‘probably compromised himself’\nJack Barsky, an author and former undercover KGB agent in the US, says that Putin’s time in the KGB is better understood as part of a mythology, rather than a source of practical techniques and craft.\n“Putin was trained and did well in German – and where was he deployed? East Germany. A friendly nation. Not where the action was. Clearly he was not considered a top-notch agent. That does not nullify the fact that he is a very clever politician. He managed to come out of security and get to the highest position in one of the most powerful countries on the planet. When people ask me what he learned in the KGB that has been useful in his political life, I just say ‘lie’.”\nWhen the Mueller Report into Trump’s Russia connections was finally published in 2019, it found no evidence of grand conspiracy. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, agrees that while Trump “probably compromised himself” by borrowing money from Russian sources in the past when he was in financial difficulty, any notion of a long collusion is likely to be “rubbish”.\nBesides, he adds, it is too soon to make any firm conclusions about what might happen in Ukraine: “It is easy to draw conclusions early and be pessimistic. But what people in Washington tell me very firmly is that Trump doesn’t want to start his administration with an Afghanistan moment [a reference to the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the Asian country in 2021].\n“I think the relationship between\nTrump and Putin\nis pretty superficial. The national and international interests at stake are bigger than the egos of two people.”\nMillions of Ukrainians, who have endured years of brutal war,\nwill hope he is right\n.\nRecommended","attrs_markdown":"[Jump to content](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent\/#main-content)\n\nUK News Website of the Year 2024\n\n- [News](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/)\n- [Iran crisis](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/iran-us-war\/)\n- [Sport](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/sport\/)\n- [Business](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/business\/)\n- [Money](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/money\/)\n- [Travel](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/travel\/)\n- [Tools](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/tools-calculators-hub\/)\n- [Opinion](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/opinion\/)\n- [Ukraine](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/russia-ukraine-war\/)\n- [Health](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/health-fitness\/)\n- [Recommended](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/recommended\/)\n- [Lifestyle](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/lifestyle\/)\n- [Culture](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/)\n- [Puzzles](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/puzzles\/)\n- [Podcasts](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/podcasts\/)\n\n![](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/etc.clientlibs\/settings\/wcm\/designs\/telegraph\/core\/clientlibs\/ui\/dist\/static\/resources\/images\/flags\/UK-SVG.svg) UK Edition\n\n- [![](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/etc.clientlibs\/settings\/wcm\/designs\/telegraph\/core\/clientlibs\/ui\/dist\/static\/resources\/images\/flags\/USA-SVG.svg) US Edition](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/)\n\n[Subscribe now](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/customer\/subscription\/store?ICID=store_button_topnav)\n\n[Log in](https:\/\/secure.telegraph.co.uk\/customer\/secure\/login\/?redirectTo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F)\n\n[See all News](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/all-sections#news)\n\n- [UK news](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/uk\/)\n  - 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Here’s why\nThe US president’s controversial ties to Russia are once again under close examination as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine\n\n[1678](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent\/#comment)\n\nGift this article free\n\nGift article\n\nGive full access to this article, free time. 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[See more]() His recent interviewees have included Jeremy Clarkson, Anna Wintour and Danny Dyer. He has never won a prize.\n\nPublished\n\n13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT\n\nRelated Topics\n\n- [Russia Investigation,](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/russia-investigation\/)\n- [Russia-Ukraine war,](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/ukraine-crisis\/)\n- [Trump's America,](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/trumps-america\/)\n- [Donald Trump,](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/donald-trump\/)\n- [Vladimir Putin](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/vladimir-putin\/)\n\n[1678](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent\/#comment)\n\nGift this article free\n\nGift article\n\nGive full access to this article, free time. You have 15 articles left to gift, this month.\n\n[Log in](https:\/\/secure.telegraph.co.uk\/customer\/secure\/login\/?redirectTo=&icid=logincta_article_gifting) or\n\n[Subscribe](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/customer\/subscription\/store?icid=store_button_articlegifting)\n\n- Copy link\n- [twitter](https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F&text=Has+Putin+turned+Trump+into+an+unwitting+agent%3F)\n- [facebook](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F)\n- [whatsapp](https:\/\/wa.me\/?text=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F)\n- [email](mailto:?to=&subject=Has+Putin+turned+Trump+into+an+unwitting+agent%3F&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F)\n\n[Add us as preferred source](https:\/\/www.google.com\/preferences\/source?q=https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk)\n\n- Copy link\n- [twitter](https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F&text=Has+Putin+turned+Trump+into+an+unwitting+agent%3F)\n- [facebook](https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F)\n- [whatsapp](https:\/\/wa.me\/?text=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F)\n- [email](mailto:?to=&subject=Has+Putin+turned+Trump+into+an+unwitting+agent%3F&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F02%2F13%2Ftrump-putin-secret-kgb-agent%2F)\n\n![U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany in 2017](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/etc.clientlibs\/settings\/wcm\/designs\/telegraph\/core\/clientlibs\/ui\/dist\/static\/resources\/images\/liftIgniter-moreStories-placeholder.svg)\n\nWith Putin and Trump looking to end the war in Ukraine, the relationship between the two leaders has never been more important   Credit: AP\n\n[Ed Cumming](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/authors\/e\/ea-ee\/ed-cumming\/)   ![Ed Cumming](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/content\/dam\/Author%20photos\/Ed%20Cumming-xlarge.png?imwidth=100)\n\nEd Cumming is a senior feature writer and columnist who started at the Telegraph in 2009, left in 2014 and came back in 2022 after a stint in the Left-wing press. [See more]() His recent interviewees have included Jeremy Clarkson, Anna Wintour and Danny Dyer. He has never won a prize.\n\nPublished\n\n13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT\n\nAs Russia and the US [move to negotiate a peace treaty over Ukraine](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/opinion\/2025\/02\/13\/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory\/), all eyes are on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two men have seemingly decided to settle things bilaterally; the world’s most nuclear-armed bromance has never felt more consequential.\n\nIn a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, during which they “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”.\n\nLater that day, the president told reporters he and Putin would “meet in Saudi Arabia” and that while it was unlikely Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, “some of that land will come back”. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the Russian president agreed with Trump that it was time to work together.\n\nThe surprise conversation came just hours after a prisoner exchange. [On Tuesday, Russia released Marc Fogel](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/news\/2025\/02\/11\/trump-envoy-moscow-returns-freed-us-citizen-marc-fogel\/), an American schoolteacher and former diplomat, who had been serving a 14-year sentence for marijuana possession, in exchange for an unnamed Russian national who had been jailed in the US on money laundering charges.\n\nSome fear the negotiations are an opportunity for Putin to claim a great victory. In an article for *The Telegraph*, Sir Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, [wrote that the talks had “echoes of Nazi appeasement,”](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-ukraine-peace-talks-echoes-nazi-appeasement-wallace\/) while others have talked of a “betrayal” of Ukraine that will cede swathes of territory to Putin.\n\nThe latest developments have fuelled a theory among former senior figures in US intelligence that Trump has been unwittingly cultivated by Putin. As far back as 2016, Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, argued that Putin was bringing his experience as a spy to bear on the future American president.\n\n“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them,” Morell wrote in *The New York Times*. “That is exactly what he did early in the \\[2016 Republican\\] primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.”\n\nIf Putin was trying to make the new US President feel powerful this week, he could hardly have done more. Rather than an international community responding to an unprovoked invasion, the talk around Ukraine this week resembles Yalta or Versailles, with a handful of Great Men carving up the world. It is telling that the [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems hardly to be involved](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/zelensky-do-not-do-ukraine-deal-behind-my-back\/), let alone Sir Keir Starmer or the other European leaders. On Thursday, Russia clarified that Ukraine would “of course” take part in any talks, after Zelensky said he would not accept a deal made without Ukraine. But it is clear who is in the driving seat.\n\n## Hardball foreign policy realism\nSpeculation about Trump’s relationship with Russia has swirled around him since he entered politics. At the far end of the spectrum is the idea that Trump is irrevocably compromised by secret *kompromat* (blackmail collateral) held on him in Russian vaults. Away from the more outlandish conspiracies, the truth may be that Putin has worked out, through experience and cunning, how to push Trump’s buttons and, in so doing, achieve his foreign policy ambitions.\n\n“There have been lots of accusations that Trump’s a spy, including that [ludicrous Steele dossier](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/politics\/2024\/03\/07\/donald-trump-300000-pounds-costs-christopher-steele\/),” says John Foreman, who was UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022.\n\n![Donald Trump (L) chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/etc.clientlibs\/settings\/wcm\/designs\/telegraph\/core\/clientlibs\/ui\/dist\/static\/resources\/images\/liftIgniter-moreStories-placeholder.svg)\n\n‘Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out,’ says John Foreman, UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022   Credit: AFP\n\n“Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out. He’s released hostages. Some of his comments about common sense have been picked to resonate with \\[Trump\\].”\n\nAdditionally, he says, Putin flatters Trump’s worldview: “Trump has been reelected and he has a certain way of doing business. It’s hardball foreign policy realism, settling conflict by redrawing maps over the heads of other people using American power. It is pretty much how Putin sees the world as well. Trump spoke about how he got on well with Putin at Helsinki. Personal interaction matters, especially when he doesn’t have much relationship with Zelensky or Starmer.\n\n“But it goes back to that deeper point about America as a great power, not beholden to the rules-based international order.”\n\n## Trump ‘is naive about who Putin really is’\nTrump has been dogged by speculation about his ties to Russia since he first announced he was running for President, nearly a decade ago. In his pre-political life as a property developer he expressed sporadic interest in property deals in Moscow, before the infamous Miss America pageant in 2013.\n\nA dossier drawn up by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele (and leaked in 2017) reported [unsubstantiated allegations that while Trump was staying in Moscow for the pageant, he was filmed with sex workers](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/news\/2024\/02\/01\/donald-trump-steele-dossier-sex-claims-case-dismissed\/), creating *kompromat* that Russia has been able to use against him since. In January 2017, as Trump took office for the first time, a declassified assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA argued that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process” and damage Hillary Clinton’s credibility.\n\nSince then, former agents and security officials on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly expressed their fears that Putin has used his KGB training to cultivate Trump. Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and stayed until 1991. Between 1985-1990 he worked undercover in Dresden, where he was a liaison to the Stasi while pretending to be a translator.\n\nMost recently, last October, Leon Panetta, a former director of the CIA who served as defence secretary under Obama, said that [Trump had “turned into a source for Putin](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/news\/2024\/10\/10\/kremlin-confirms-donald-trump-sent-putin-covid-19-tests\/), and somebody who can help him manipulate what he wants to get done”.\n\n“I think Donald Trump in many ways is naive about who Putin really is,” Panetta told the *One Decision* podcast.\n\n“\\[Putin\\] knows how to work a source and he’s got a source that is very near the top in this country. He, himself is going to engage that source.”\n\n## A charm offensive\nSome have claimed that the influence on Trump goes back even further. Yuri Shvets, a KGB major who was posted to Washington, DC in the 1980s, claimed that the Soviet Union started cultivating Trump more than 40 years ago.\n\n[*American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump*](https:\/\/books.telegraph.co.uk\/Product\/Craig-Unger\/American-Kompromat--how-the-KGB-cultivated-Donald-Trump-a\/26868145) by journalist Craig Unger claims that the KGB identified Trump as a young businessman on the rise as early as 1977, after he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. Shvets, a source for the book, said that an electronics shop near Trump’s hotel, the Grand Hyatt New York, was really a KGB front. When the Trumps visited Russia for the first time in 1987, KGB operatives flattered Trump and told him he ought to go into politics.\n\n“It was a charm offensive,” Shvets told *The Guardian*. “They had collected a lot of information on \\[Trump’s\\] personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.\n\n“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called ‘active measures’ soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”\n\n“Putin will be thrilled to have Trump as a negotiating partner,” Unger adds. “He’s an easy mark, a narcissist. The key is to flatter him. He looks up to Putin.”\n\n## Trump ‘probably compromised himself’\nJack Barsky, an author and former undercover KGB agent in the US, says that Putin’s time in the KGB is better understood as part of a mythology, rather than a source of practical techniques and craft.\n\n“Putin was trained and did well in German – and where was he deployed? East Germany. A friendly nation. Not where the action was. Clearly he was not considered a top-notch agent. That does not nullify the fact that he is a very clever politician. He managed to come out of security and get to the highest position in one of the most powerful countries on the planet. When people ask me what he learned in the KGB that has been useful in his political life, I just say ‘lie’.”\n\nWhen the Mueller Report into Trump’s Russia connections was finally published in 2019, it found no evidence of grand conspiracy. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, agrees that while Trump “probably compromised himself” by borrowing money from Russian sources in the past when he was in financial difficulty, any notion of a long collusion is likely to be “rubbish”.\n\nBesides, he adds, it is too soon to make any firm conclusions about what might happen in Ukraine: “It is easy to draw conclusions early and be pessimistic. But what people in Washington tell me very firmly is that Trump doesn’t want to start his administration with an Afghanistan moment \\[a reference to the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the Asian country in 2021\\].\n\n“I think the relationship between [Trump and Putin](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/world-news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-putin-zelensky-call-ukraine-russia-war\/) is pretty superficial. The national and international interests at stake are bigger than the egos of two people.”\n\nMillions of Ukrainians, who have endured years of brutal war, [will hope he is right](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/opinion\/2025\/02\/13\/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory\/).\n\nRecommended\n\n[This is Putin and Trump's world now](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/world-news\/2025\/02\/12\/this-is-vladimir-putin-and-donald-trumps-world-now\/)\n\n[Read more](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/world-news\/2025\/02\/12\/this-is-vladimir-putin-and-donald-trumps-world-now\/)\n\n## Join the conversation\nShow 1678 comments\n\nThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. 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[See more]()\n\nPublished  13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT\n\nAs Russia and the US [move to negotiate a peace treaty over Ukraine](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/opinion\/2025\/02\/13\/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory\/), all eyes are on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two men have seemingly decided to settle things bilaterally; the world’s most nuclear-armed bromance has never felt more consequential.\n\nIn a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, during which they “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”.\n\nLater that day, the president told reporters he and Putin would “meet in Saudi Arabia” and that while it was unlikely Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, “some of that land will come back”. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the Russian president agreed with Trump that it was time to work together.\n\nThe surprise conversation came just hours after a prisoner exchange. [On Tuesday, Russia released Marc Fogel](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/news\/2025\/02\/11\/trump-envoy-moscow-returns-freed-us-citizen-marc-fogel\/), an American schoolteacher and former diplomat, who had been serving a 14-year sentence for marijuana possession, in exchange for an unnamed Russian national who had been jailed in the US on money laundering charges.\n\nSome fear the negotiations are an opportunity for Putin to claim a great victory. In an article for *The Telegraph*, Sir Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, [wrote that the talks had “echoes of Nazi appeasement,”](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-ukraine-peace-talks-echoes-nazi-appeasement-wallace\/) while others have talked of a “betrayal” of Ukraine that will cede swathes of territory to Putin.\n\nThe latest developments have fuelled a theory among former senior figures in US intelligence that Trump has been unwittingly cultivated by Putin. As far back as 2016, Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, argued that Putin was bringing his experience as a spy to bear on the future American president.\n\n“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them,” Morell wrote in *The New York Times*. “That is exactly what he did early in the \\[2016 Republican\\] primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.”\n\nIf Putin was trying to make the new US President feel powerful this week, he could hardly have done more. Rather than an international community responding to an unprovoked invasion, the talk around Ukraine this week resembles Yalta or Versailles, with a handful of Great Men carving up the world. It is telling that the [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems hardly to be involved](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2025\/02\/13\/zelensky-do-not-do-ukraine-deal-behind-my-back\/), let alone Sir Keir Starmer or the other European leaders. On Thursday, Russia clarified that Ukraine would “of course” take part in any talks, after Zelensky said he would not accept a deal made without Ukraine. But it is clear who is in the driving seat.\n\n## Hardball foreign policy realism\nSpeculation about Trump’s relationship with Russia has swirled around him since he entered politics. At the far end of the spectrum is the idea that Trump is irrevocably compromised by secret *kompromat* (blackmail collateral) held on him in Russian vaults. Away from the more outlandish conspiracies, the truth may be that Putin has worked out, through experience and cunning, how to push Trump’s buttons and, in so doing, achieve his foreign policy ambitions.\n\n“There have been lots of accusations that Trump’s a spy, including that [ludicrous Steele dossier](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/politics\/2024\/03\/07\/donald-trump-300000-pounds-costs-christopher-steele\/),” says John Foreman, who was UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022.\n\n![Donald Trump (L) chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/etc.clientlibs\/settings\/wcm\/designs\/telegraph\/core\/clientlibs\/ui\/dist\/static\/resources\/images\/liftIgniter-moreStories-placeholder.svg)\n\n‘Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out,’ says John Foreman, UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022   Credit: AFP\n\n“Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out. He’s released hostages. Some of his comments about common sense have been picked to resonate with \\[Trump\\].”\n\nAdditionally, he says, Putin flatters Trump’s worldview: “Trump has been reelected and he has a certain way of doing business. It’s hardball foreign policy realism, settling conflict by redrawing maps over the heads of other people using American power. It is pretty much how Putin sees the world as well. Trump spoke about how he got on well with Putin at Helsinki. Personal interaction matters, especially when he doesn’t have much relationship with Zelensky or Starmer.\n\n“But it goes back to that deeper point about America as a great power, not beholden to the rules-based international order.”\n\n## Trump ‘is naive about who Putin really is’\nTrump has been dogged by speculation about his ties to Russia since he first announced he was running for President, nearly a decade ago. In his pre-political life as a property developer he expressed sporadic interest in property deals in Moscow, before the infamous Miss America pageant in 2013.\n\nA dossier drawn up by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele (and leaked in 2017) reported [unsubstantiated allegations that while Trump was staying in Moscow for the pageant, he was filmed with sex workers](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/news\/2024\/02\/01\/donald-trump-steele-dossier-sex-claims-case-dismissed\/), creating *kompromat* that Russia has been able to use against him since. In January 2017, as Trump took office for the first time, a declassified assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA argued that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process” and damage Hillary Clinton’s credibility.\n\nSince then, former agents and security officials on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly expressed their fears that Putin has used his KGB training to cultivate Trump. Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and stayed until 1991. Between 1985-1990 he worked undercover in Dresden, where he was a liaison to the Stasi while pretending to be a translator.\n\nMost recently, last October, Leon Panetta, a former director of the CIA who served as defence secretary under Obama, said that [Trump had “turned into a source for Putin](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/us\/news\/2024\/10\/10\/kremlin-confirms-donald-trump-sent-putin-covid-19-tests\/), and somebody who can help him manipulate what he wants to get done”.\n\n“I think Donald Trump in many ways is naive about who Putin really is,” Panetta told the *One Decision* podcast.\n\n“\\[Putin\\] knows how to work a source and he’s got a source that is very near the top in this country. He, himself is going to engage that source.”\n\n## A charm offensive\nSome have claimed that the influence on Trump goes back even further. Yuri Shvets, a KGB major who was posted to Washington, DC in the 1980s, claimed that the Soviet Union started cultivating Trump more than 40 years ago.\n\n[*American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump*](https:\/\/books.telegraph.co.uk\/Product\/Craig-Unger\/American-Kompromat--how-the-KGB-cultivated-Donald-Trump-a\/26868145) by journalist Craig Unger claims that the KGB identified Trump as a young businessman on the rise as early as 1977, after he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. Shvets, a source for the book, said that an electronics shop near Trump’s hotel, the Grand Hyatt New York, was really a KGB front. When the Trumps visited Russia for the first time in 1987, KGB operatives flattered Trump and told him he ought to go into politics.\n\n“It was a charm offensive,” Shvets told *The Guardian*. “They had collected a lot of information on \\[Trump’s\\] personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.\n\n“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called ‘active measures’ soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”\n\n“Putin will be thrilled to have Trump as a negotiating partner,” Unger adds. “He’s an easy mark, a narcissist. The key is to flatter him. He looks up to Putin.”\n\n## Trump ‘probably compromised himself’\nJack Barsky, an author and former undercover KGB agent in the US, says that Putin’s time in the KGB is better understood as part of a mythology, rather than a source of practical techniques and craft.\n\n“Putin was trained and did well in German – and where was he deployed? East Germany. A friendly nation. Not where the action was. Clearly he was not considered a top-notch agent. That does not nullify the fact that he is a very clever politician. He managed to come out of security and get to the highest position in one of the most powerful countries on the planet. When people ask me what he learned in the KGB that has been useful in his political life, I just say ‘lie’.”\n\nWhen the Mueller Report into Trump’s Russia connections was finally published in 2019, it found no evidence of grand conspiracy. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, agrees that while Trump “probably compromised himself” by borrowing money from Russian sources in the past when he was in financial difficulty, any notion of a long collusion is likely to be “rubbish”.\n\nBesides, he adds, it is too soon to make any firm conclusions about what might happen in Ukraine: “It is easy to draw conclusions early and be pessimistic. But what people in Washington tell me very firmly is that Trump doesn’t want to start his administration with an Afghanistan moment \\[a reference to the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the Asian country in 2021\\].\n\n“I think the relationship between [Trump and Putin](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/world-news\/2025\/02\/13\/trump-putin-zelensky-call-ukraine-russia-war\/) is pretty superficial. The national and international interests at stake are bigger than the egos of two people.”\n\nMillions of Ukrainians, who have endured years of brutal war, [will hope he is right](https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/opinion\/2025\/02\/13\/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory\/).\n\nRecommended","meta_canonical":null,"ml_categories_json":"{\"\/News\":833,\"\/News\/Politics\":745,\"\/News\/Politics\/Campaigns_and_Elections\":650,\"\/Law_and_Government\":199}","ml_types_json":"{\"\/Article\":998,\"\/Article\/News_Update\":919}","ml_intent_types_json":"{\"Informational\":999}","meta_language":"en","attrs_author":"Ed Cumming","attrs_publish_time":1739479860,"attrs_original_publish_time":1739479860,"attrs_is_republished":0,"attrs_nr_words":"2515","attrs_boilerpipe_nr_words":"1645","body_ext_links_number":15,"body_int_links_number":230,"meta_nofollow":0,"meta_noarchive":0,"props_was_rendered":1,"src_redirect":"","download_time_msec":1056,"download_ttfb_msec":1054,"download_size":49108}

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The US president’s controversial ties to Russia are once again under close examination as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine Ed Cumming Ed Cumming is a senior feature writer and columnist who started at the Telegraph in 2009, left in 2014 and came back in 2022 after a stint in the Left-wing press. See more Published 13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT As Russia and the US move to negotiate a peace treaty over Ukraine , all eyes are on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two men have seemingly decided to settle things bilaterally; the world’s most nuclear-armed bromance has never felt more consequential. In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, during which they “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”. Later that day, the president told reporters he and Putin would “meet in Saudi Arabia” and that while it was unlikely Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, “some of that land will come back”. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the Russian president agreed with Trump that it was time to work together. The surprise conversation came just hours after a prisoner exchange. On Tuesday, Russia released Marc Fogel , an American schoolteacher and former diplomat, who had been serving a 14-year sentence for marijuana possession, in exchange for an unnamed Russian national who had been jailed in the US on money laundering charges. Some fear the negotiations are an opportunity for Putin to claim a great victory. In an article for The Telegraph , Sir Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, wrote that the talks had “echoes of Nazi appeasement,” while others have talked of a “betrayal” of Ukraine that will cede swathes of territory to Putin. The latest developments have fuelled a theory among former senior figures in US intelligence that Trump has been unwittingly cultivated by Putin. As far back as 2016, Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, argued that Putin was bringing his experience as a spy to bear on the future American president. “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them,” Morell wrote in The New York Times . “That is exactly what he did early in the [2016 Republican] primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.” If Putin was trying to make the new US President feel powerful this week, he could hardly have done more. Rather than an international community responding to an unprovoked invasion, the talk around Ukraine this week resembles Yalta or Versailles, with a handful of Great Men carving up the world. It is telling that the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems hardly to be involved , let alone Sir Keir Starmer or the other European leaders. On Thursday, Russia clarified that Ukraine would “of course” take part in any talks, after Zelensky said he would not accept a deal made without Ukraine. But it is clear who is in the driving seat. Hardball foreign policy realism Speculation about Trump’s relationship with Russia has swirled around him since he entered politics. At the far end of the spectrum is the idea that Trump is irrevocably compromised by secret kompromat (blackmail collateral) held on him in Russian vaults. Away from the more outlandish conspiracies, the truth may be that Putin has worked out, through experience and cunning, how to push Trump’s buttons and, in so doing, achieve his foreign policy ambitions. “There have been lots of accusations that Trump’s a spy, including that ludicrous Steele dossier ,” says John Foreman, who was UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022. ‘Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out,’ says John Foreman, UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022 Credit : AFP “Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out. He’s released hostages. Some of his comments about common sense have been picked to resonate with [Trump].” Additionally, he says, Putin flatters Trump’s worldview: “Trump has been reelected and he has a certain way of doing business. It’s hardball foreign policy realism, settling conflict by redrawing maps over the heads of other people using American power. It is pretty much how Putin sees the world as well. Trump spoke about how he got on well with Putin at Helsinki. Personal interaction matters, especially when he doesn’t have much relationship with Zelensky or Starmer. “But it goes back to that deeper point about America as a great power, not beholden to the rules-based international order.” Trump ‘is naive about who Putin really is’ Trump has been dogged by speculation about his ties to Russia since he first announced he was running for President, nearly a decade ago. In his pre-political life as a property developer he expressed sporadic interest in property deals in Moscow, before the infamous Miss America pageant in 2013. A dossier drawn up by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele (and leaked in 2017) reported unsubstantiated allegations that while Trump was staying in Moscow for the pageant, he was filmed with sex workers , creating kompromat that Russia has been able to use against him since. In January 2017, as Trump took office for the first time, a declassified assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA argued that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process” and damage Hillary Clinton’s credibility. Since then, former agents and security officials on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly expressed their fears that Putin has used his KGB training to cultivate Trump. Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and stayed until 1991. Between 1985-1990 he worked undercover in Dresden, where he was a liaison to the Stasi while pretending to be a translator. Most recently, last October, Leon Panetta, a former director of the CIA who served as defence secretary under Obama, said that Trump had “turned into a source for Putin , and somebody who can help him manipulate what he wants to get done”. “I think Donald Trump in many ways is naive about who Putin really is,” Panetta told the One Decision podcast. “[Putin] knows how to work a source and he’s got a source that is very near the top in this country. He, himself is going to engage that source.” A charm offensive Some have claimed that the influence on Trump goes back even further. Yuri Shvets, a KGB major who was posted to Washington, DC in the 1980s, claimed that the Soviet Union started cultivating Trump more than 40 years ago. American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump by journalist Craig Unger claims that the KGB identified Trump as a young businessman on the rise as early as 1977, after he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. Shvets, a source for the book, said that an electronics shop near Trump’s hotel, the Grand Hyatt New York, was really a KGB front. When the Trumps visited Russia for the first time in 1987, KGB operatives flattered Trump and told him he ought to go into politics. “It was a charm offensive,” Shvets told The Guardian . “They had collected a lot of information on [Trump’s] personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery. “This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called ‘active measures’ soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.” “Putin will be thrilled to have Trump as a negotiating partner,” Unger adds. “He’s an easy mark, a narcissist. The key is to flatter him. He looks up to Putin.” Trump ‘probably compromised himself’ Jack Barsky, an author and former undercover KGB agent in the US, says that Putin’s time in the KGB is better understood as part of a mythology, rather than a source of practical techniques and craft. “Putin was trained and did well in German – and where was he deployed? East Germany. A friendly nation. Not where the action was. Clearly he was not considered a top-notch agent. That does not nullify the fact that he is a very clever politician. He managed to come out of security and get to the highest position in one of the most powerful countries on the planet. When people ask me what he learned in the KGB that has been useful in his political life, I just say ‘lie’.” When the Mueller Report into Trump’s Russia connections was finally published in 2019, it found no evidence of grand conspiracy. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, agrees that while Trump “probably compromised himself” by borrowing money from Russian sources in the past when he was in financial difficulty, any notion of a long collusion is likely to be “rubbish”. Besides, he adds, it is too soon to make any firm conclusions about what might happen in Ukraine: “It is easy to draw conclusions early and be pessimistic. But what people in Washington tell me very firmly is that Trump doesn’t want to start his administration with an Afghanistan moment [a reference to the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the Asian country in 2021]. “I think the relationship between Trump and Putin is pretty superficial. The national and international interests at stake are bigger than the egos of two people.” Millions of Ukrainians, who have endured years of brutal war, will hope he is right . Recommended

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[See more]() His recent interviewees have included Jeremy Clarkson, Anna Wintour and Danny Dyer. He has never won a prize. Published 13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT Related Topics - [Russia Investigation,](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/russia-investigation/) - [Russia-Ukraine war,](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ukraine-crisis/) - [Trump's America,](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/trumps-america/) - [Donald Trump,](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/donald-trump/) - [Vladimir Putin](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/vladimir-putin/) [1678](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/trump-putin-secret-kgb-agent/#comment) Gift this article free Gift article Give full access to this article, free time. You have 15 articles left to gift, this month. 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[See more]() His recent interviewees have included Jeremy Clarkson, Anna Wintour and Danny Dyer. He has never won a prize. Published 13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT As Russia and the US [move to negotiate a peace treaty over Ukraine](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2025/02/13/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory/), all eyes are on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two men have seemingly decided to settle things bilaterally; the world’s most nuclear-armed bromance has never felt more consequential. In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, during which they “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”. Later that day, the president told reporters he and Putin would “meet in Saudi Arabia” and that while it was unlikely Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, “some of that land will come back”. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the Russian president agreed with Trump that it was time to work together. The surprise conversation came just hours after a prisoner exchange. [On Tuesday, Russia released Marc Fogel](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/02/11/trump-envoy-moscow-returns-freed-us-citizen-marc-fogel/), an American schoolteacher and former diplomat, who had been serving a 14-year sentence for marijuana possession, in exchange for an unnamed Russian national who had been jailed in the US on money laundering charges. Some fear the negotiations are an opportunity for Putin to claim a great victory. In an article for *The Telegraph*, Sir Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, [wrote that the talks had “echoes of Nazi appeasement,”](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/trump-ukraine-peace-talks-echoes-nazi-appeasement-wallace/) while others have talked of a “betrayal” of Ukraine that will cede swathes of territory to Putin. The latest developments have fuelled a theory among former senior figures in US intelligence that Trump has been unwittingly cultivated by Putin. As far back as 2016, Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, argued that Putin was bringing his experience as a spy to bear on the future American president. “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them,” Morell wrote in *The New York Times*. “That is exactly what he did early in the \[2016 Republican\] primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.” If Putin was trying to make the new US President feel powerful this week, he could hardly have done more. Rather than an international community responding to an unprovoked invasion, the talk around Ukraine this week resembles Yalta or Versailles, with a handful of Great Men carving up the world. It is telling that the [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems hardly to be involved](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/zelensky-do-not-do-ukraine-deal-behind-my-back/), let alone Sir Keir Starmer or the other European leaders. On Thursday, Russia clarified that Ukraine would “of course” take part in any talks, after Zelensky said he would not accept a deal made without Ukraine. But it is clear who is in the driving seat. ## Hardball foreign policy realism Speculation about Trump’s relationship with Russia has swirled around him since he entered politics. At the far end of the spectrum is the idea that Trump is irrevocably compromised by secret *kompromat* (blackmail collateral) held on him in Russian vaults. Away from the more outlandish conspiracies, the truth may be that Putin has worked out, through experience and cunning, how to push Trump’s buttons and, in so doing, achieve his foreign policy ambitions. “There have been lots of accusations that Trump’s a spy, including that [ludicrous Steele dossier](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/03/07/donald-trump-300000-pounds-costs-christopher-steele/),” says John Foreman, who was UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022. ![Donald Trump (L) chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/etc.clientlibs/settings/wcm/designs/telegraph/core/clientlibs/ui/dist/static/resources/images/liftIgniter-moreStories-placeholder.svg) ‘Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out,’ says John Foreman, UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022 Credit: AFP “Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out. He’s released hostages. Some of his comments about common sense have been picked to resonate with \[Trump\].” Additionally, he says, Putin flatters Trump’s worldview: “Trump has been reelected and he has a certain way of doing business. It’s hardball foreign policy realism, settling conflict by redrawing maps over the heads of other people using American power. It is pretty much how Putin sees the world as well. Trump spoke about how he got on well with Putin at Helsinki. Personal interaction matters, especially when he doesn’t have much relationship with Zelensky or Starmer. “But it goes back to that deeper point about America as a great power, not beholden to the rules-based international order.” ## Trump ‘is naive about who Putin really is’ Trump has been dogged by speculation about his ties to Russia since he first announced he was running for President, nearly a decade ago. In his pre-political life as a property developer he expressed sporadic interest in property deals in Moscow, before the infamous Miss America pageant in 2013. A dossier drawn up by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele (and leaked in 2017) reported [unsubstantiated allegations that while Trump was staying in Moscow for the pageant, he was filmed with sex workers](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/02/01/donald-trump-steele-dossier-sex-claims-case-dismissed/), creating *kompromat* that Russia has been able to use against him since. In January 2017, as Trump took office for the first time, a declassified assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA argued that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process” and damage Hillary Clinton’s credibility. Since then, former agents and security officials on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly expressed their fears that Putin has used his KGB training to cultivate Trump. Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and stayed until 1991. Between 1985-1990 he worked undercover in Dresden, where he was a liaison to the Stasi while pretending to be a translator. Most recently, last October, Leon Panetta, a former director of the CIA who served as defence secretary under Obama, said that [Trump had “turned into a source for Putin](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/10/10/kremlin-confirms-donald-trump-sent-putin-covid-19-tests/), and somebody who can help him manipulate what he wants to get done”. “I think Donald Trump in many ways is naive about who Putin really is,” Panetta told the *One Decision* podcast. “\[Putin\] knows how to work a source and he’s got a source that is very near the top in this country. He, himself is going to engage that source.” ## A charm offensive Some have claimed that the influence on Trump goes back even further. Yuri Shvets, a KGB major who was posted to Washington, DC in the 1980s, claimed that the Soviet Union started cultivating Trump more than 40 years ago. [*American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump*](https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Craig-Unger/American-Kompromat--how-the-KGB-cultivated-Donald-Trump-a/26868145) by journalist Craig Unger claims that the KGB identified Trump as a young businessman on the rise as early as 1977, after he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. Shvets, a source for the book, said that an electronics shop near Trump’s hotel, the Grand Hyatt New York, was really a KGB front. When the Trumps visited Russia for the first time in 1987, KGB operatives flattered Trump and told him he ought to go into politics. “It was a charm offensive,” Shvets told *The Guardian*. “They had collected a lot of information on \[Trump’s\] personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery. “This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called ‘active measures’ soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.” “Putin will be thrilled to have Trump as a negotiating partner,” Unger adds. “He’s an easy mark, a narcissist. The key is to flatter him. He looks up to Putin.” ## Trump ‘probably compromised himself’ Jack Barsky, an author and former undercover KGB agent in the US, says that Putin’s time in the KGB is better understood as part of a mythology, rather than a source of practical techniques and craft. “Putin was trained and did well in German – and where was he deployed? East Germany. A friendly nation. Not where the action was. Clearly he was not considered a top-notch agent. That does not nullify the fact that he is a very clever politician. He managed to come out of security and get to the highest position in one of the most powerful countries on the planet. When people ask me what he learned in the KGB that has been useful in his political life, I just say ‘lie’.” When the Mueller Report into Trump’s Russia connections was finally published in 2019, it found no evidence of grand conspiracy. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, agrees that while Trump “probably compromised himself” by borrowing money from Russian sources in the past when he was in financial difficulty, any notion of a long collusion is likely to be “rubbish”. Besides, he adds, it is too soon to make any firm conclusions about what might happen in Ukraine: “It is easy to draw conclusions early and be pessimistic. But what people in Washington tell me very firmly is that Trump doesn’t want to start his administration with an Afghanistan moment \[a reference to the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the Asian country in 2021\]. “I think the relationship between [Trump and Putin](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/13/trump-putin-zelensky-call-ukraine-russia-war/) is pretty superficial. The national and international interests at stake are bigger than the egos of two people.” Millions of Ukrainians, who have endured years of brutal war, [will hope he is right](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2025/02/13/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory/). Recommended [This is Putin and Trump's world now](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/12/this-is-vladimir-putin-and-donald-trumps-world-now/) [Read more](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/12/this-is-vladimir-putin-and-donald-trumps-world-now/) ## Join the conversation Show 1678 comments The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. 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The US president’s controversial ties to Russia are once again under close examination as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine [Ed Cumming](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/e/ea-ee/ed-cumming/) Ed Cumming is a senior feature writer and columnist who started at the Telegraph in 2009, left in 2014 and came back in 2022 after a stint in the Left-wing press. [See more]() Published 13 February 2025 8:51pm GMT As Russia and the US [move to negotiate a peace treaty over Ukraine](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2025/02/13/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory/), all eyes are on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The two men have seemingly decided to settle things bilaterally; the world’s most nuclear-armed bromance has never felt more consequential. In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, during which they “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”. Later that day, the president told reporters he and Putin would “meet in Saudi Arabia” and that while it was unlikely Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, “some of that land will come back”. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the Russian president agreed with Trump that it was time to work together. The surprise conversation came just hours after a prisoner exchange. [On Tuesday, Russia released Marc Fogel](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/02/11/trump-envoy-moscow-returns-freed-us-citizen-marc-fogel/), an American schoolteacher and former diplomat, who had been serving a 14-year sentence for marijuana possession, in exchange for an unnamed Russian national who had been jailed in the US on money laundering charges. Some fear the negotiations are an opportunity for Putin to claim a great victory. In an article for *The Telegraph*, Sir Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, [wrote that the talks had “echoes of Nazi appeasement,”](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/trump-ukraine-peace-talks-echoes-nazi-appeasement-wallace/) while others have talked of a “betrayal” of Ukraine that will cede swathes of territory to Putin. The latest developments have fuelled a theory among former senior figures in US intelligence that Trump has been unwittingly cultivated by Putin. As far back as 2016, Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, argued that Putin was bringing his experience as a spy to bear on the future American president. “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them,” Morell wrote in *The New York Times*. “That is exactly what he did early in the \[2016 Republican\] primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.” If Putin was trying to make the new US President feel powerful this week, he could hardly have done more. Rather than an international community responding to an unprovoked invasion, the talk around Ukraine this week resembles Yalta or Versailles, with a handful of Great Men carving up the world. It is telling that the [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems hardly to be involved](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/13/zelensky-do-not-do-ukraine-deal-behind-my-back/), let alone Sir Keir Starmer or the other European leaders. On Thursday, Russia clarified that Ukraine would “of course” take part in any talks, after Zelensky said he would not accept a deal made without Ukraine. But it is clear who is in the driving seat. ## Hardball foreign policy realism Speculation about Trump’s relationship with Russia has swirled around him since he entered politics. At the far end of the spectrum is the idea that Trump is irrevocably compromised by secret *kompromat* (blackmail collateral) held on him in Russian vaults. Away from the more outlandish conspiracies, the truth may be that Putin has worked out, through experience and cunning, how to push Trump’s buttons and, in so doing, achieve his foreign policy ambitions. “There have been lots of accusations that Trump’s a spy, including that [ludicrous Steele dossier](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/03/07/donald-trump-300000-pounds-costs-christopher-steele/),” says John Foreman, who was UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022. ![Donald Trump (L) chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/etc.clientlibs/settings/wcm/designs/telegraph/core/clientlibs/ui/dist/static/resources/images/liftIgniter-moreStories-placeholder.svg) ‘Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out,’ says John Foreman, UK defence attaché to Moscow from 2019-2022 Credit: AFP “Putin flatters Trump. He has waited him out. He’s released hostages. Some of his comments about common sense have been picked to resonate with \[Trump\].” Additionally, he says, Putin flatters Trump’s worldview: “Trump has been reelected and he has a certain way of doing business. It’s hardball foreign policy realism, settling conflict by redrawing maps over the heads of other people using American power. It is pretty much how Putin sees the world as well. Trump spoke about how he got on well with Putin at Helsinki. Personal interaction matters, especially when he doesn’t have much relationship with Zelensky or Starmer. “But it goes back to that deeper point about America as a great power, not beholden to the rules-based international order.” ## Trump ‘is naive about who Putin really is’ Trump has been dogged by speculation about his ties to Russia since he first announced he was running for President, nearly a decade ago. In his pre-political life as a property developer he expressed sporadic interest in property deals in Moscow, before the infamous Miss America pageant in 2013. A dossier drawn up by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele (and leaked in 2017) reported [unsubstantiated allegations that while Trump was staying in Moscow for the pageant, he was filmed with sex workers](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/02/01/donald-trump-steele-dossier-sex-claims-case-dismissed/), creating *kompromat* that Russia has been able to use against him since. In January 2017, as Trump took office for the first time, a declassified assessment by CIA, FBI and NSA argued that Putin had “ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process” and damage Hillary Clinton’s credibility. Since then, former agents and security officials on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly expressed their fears that Putin has used his KGB training to cultivate Trump. Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and stayed until 1991. Between 1985-1990 he worked undercover in Dresden, where he was a liaison to the Stasi while pretending to be a translator. Most recently, last October, Leon Panetta, a former director of the CIA who served as defence secretary under Obama, said that [Trump had “turned into a source for Putin](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/10/10/kremlin-confirms-donald-trump-sent-putin-covid-19-tests/), and somebody who can help him manipulate what he wants to get done”. “I think Donald Trump in many ways is naive about who Putin really is,” Panetta told the *One Decision* podcast. “\[Putin\] knows how to work a source and he’s got a source that is very near the top in this country. He, himself is going to engage that source.” ## A charm offensive Some have claimed that the influence on Trump goes back even further. Yuri Shvets, a KGB major who was posted to Washington, DC in the 1980s, claimed that the Soviet Union started cultivating Trump more than 40 years ago. [*American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump*](https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Craig-Unger/American-Kompromat--how-the-KGB-cultivated-Donald-Trump-a/26868145) by journalist Craig Unger claims that the KGB identified Trump as a young businessman on the rise as early as 1977, after he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková. Shvets, a source for the book, said that an electronics shop near Trump’s hotel, the Grand Hyatt New York, was really a KGB front. When the Trumps visited Russia for the first time in 1987, KGB operatives flattered Trump and told him he ought to go into politics. “It was a charm offensive,” Shvets told *The Guardian*. “They had collected a lot of information on \[Trump’s\] personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery. “This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called ‘active measures’ soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.” “Putin will be thrilled to have Trump as a negotiating partner,” Unger adds. “He’s an easy mark, a narcissist. The key is to flatter him. He looks up to Putin.” ## Trump ‘probably compromised himself’ Jack Barsky, an author and former undercover KGB agent in the US, says that Putin’s time in the KGB is better understood as part of a mythology, rather than a source of practical techniques and craft. “Putin was trained and did well in German – and where was he deployed? East Germany. A friendly nation. Not where the action was. Clearly he was not considered a top-notch agent. That does not nullify the fact that he is a very clever politician. He managed to come out of security and get to the highest position in one of the most powerful countries on the planet. When people ask me what he learned in the KGB that has been useful in his political life, I just say ‘lie’.” When the Mueller Report into Trump’s Russia connections was finally published in 2019, it found no evidence of grand conspiracy. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, agrees that while Trump “probably compromised himself” by borrowing money from Russian sources in the past when he was in financial difficulty, any notion of a long collusion is likely to be “rubbish”. Besides, he adds, it is too soon to make any firm conclusions about what might happen in Ukraine: “It is easy to draw conclusions early and be pessimistic. But what people in Washington tell me very firmly is that Trump doesn’t want to start his administration with an Afghanistan moment \[a reference to the chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the Asian country in 2021\]. “I think the relationship between [Trump and Putin](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/13/trump-putin-zelensky-call-ukraine-russia-war/) is pretty superficial. The national and international interests at stake are bigger than the egos of two people.” Millions of Ukrainians, who have endured years of brutal war, [will hope he is right](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2025/02/13/ukraine-fought-hard-but-there-is-now-no-chance-of-victory/). Recommended

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