John Bolton said Putin put off invading Ukraine while Trump ‘did a lot of his work for him’

‘To Putin’s mind...a weaker Nato is a stronger Russia’

A former United States national security secretary adviser has said Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine while Donald Trump was president because of his hostility towards Nato, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

Speaking with Julie Mason, a journalist and the host of Julie Mason Mornings, John Bolton said Mr Trump’s known hostility of Nato meant Mr Putin was reassured of his aims while the Republican was in office.

“I think one of the reasons that Putin did not move during Trump’s term in office was he saw the president’s hostility of Nato,” Mr Bolton said on Wednesday when asked about the situation in Ukraine.

“To Putin’s mind its a binary proposition, a weaker Nato is a stronger Russia so I think Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him, and thought maybe in a second term Trump would make good on his promise to get out of Nato”.

The New York Times revealed in 2019 that Mr Trump told White House aides about his desire to remove the US from Nato, and a year later even referred to Germany as “delinquent” before removing 12,000 US troops from the Nato member and US ally in 2020.

Mr Bolton, who was asked whether or not a second Trump term would have helped Ukraine, said “I think we’d be in a lot worse state” and that Russia’s president had expressed as far as back as 2005 that he viewed the fall of the Soviet Union as a “tragedy”.

“He said back in 2005 in an address to the state duma, the parliament, that the break up of the Soviet Union had been the greatest tragedy of the 21st century and clearly he wanted to reverse it”, Mr Bolton told the radio host. “(We were) underestimating his determination to get back into control (of) and perhaps actual sovereignty (over) parts of the former Soviet Union”.

“I think a lot of people believed he would not carry through with a lot of the threats that he made”, Mr Bolton, who served as Mr Trump’s national security advisor from 2018 to 2019, said.

He told Vice News in a recent interview that he also doubted Mr Trump’s enthusiasm for standing in Mr Putin’s way, with the Republican forced to roll back on comments that described the Russian leader as “savvy” and a “genius” for launching an invasion of Ukraine, its neighbour, on a false pretext.

“You never know with Trump,” Mr Bolton said. “It depends on what time of day it is, it depends on what he thought his political benefit would be at any given moment. I don’t think ultimately he would have stood in Putin’s way”.