WaPo Columnist: Putin Wishes Trump Were Around Because Biden Is So Tough

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin must wish Donald Trump were still U.S. president, because then he could push Ukraine around, rather than facing Joe Biden’s supposedly tough stance.

The column, titled “With Biden standing firm, Putin must wonder: Where’s Trump when I need him?”, overlooks the fact that Putin did not invade Ukraine during the four years that Trump was president, and conducted a more restrained foreign policy.

Robinson writes:

If Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to gobble up another chunk of Ukraine at little or no cost to his own interests, he should have done it while Donald Trump was still president. With President Biden leading the response, Putin’s potential costs are rising — while his hoped-for benefits have evaporated.

To be clear, Putin can send his tanks across the border whenever he wants, and nobody can stop him. His recognition of the “independence” of two separatist regions in Ukraine, which call themselves the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, is an ominous development. But his threat to invade has not divided and weakened the Western alliance. Thanks largely to Biden, it has had the opposite effect.

…

Contrast all of this with what possibly, or probably, would have happened had Trump still been in office.

While he acknowledged that Putin was about to invade, Robinson claimed Biden’s allegedly stronger leadership meant an invasion “will be much costlier for Putin than he calculated.”

Robinson was a firm believer in the “Russia collusion” hoax. In 2017, he wrote a column titled “What is Trump so desperate to cover up?” in which he declared: “We know that President Trump and his campaign either colluded with the Russian effort to undermine U.S. democracy or tried mightily to do so.” The column remains uncorrected.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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