This Wall Street Journal article is a fascinating behind the scenes look at the prisoner exchange that involved Russia, the U.S. and Germany. The exchange was controversial in Germany because that country released Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a Chechen exile in a park in Berlin.
The article is interesting in several ways, but I want to focus on the relevance of the upcoming election in the U.S.:
[Deputy chief of the foreign secret service BND Philipp] Wolff’s team saw an opening when their Russian counterparts said they wanted to wrap up the deal before the U.S. election in November. Some officials deduced that the Russians were either concerned about an unpredictable Donald Trump coming again to the presidency, or they feared that [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz would no longer be willing to help a president who rarely misses an opportunity to criticize Germany.
“We then decided to push it to the limit,” a senior official involved in the talks said.
So the Russians were eager to make a deal before our election in November. Gosh. Why might that be? I don’t think it was because Donald Trump is “unpredictable,” or because they thought Olaf Scholz would somehow change his tune. Far from being unpredictable, I think it was entirely foreseeable that Trump would not be a pushover. Would not be a pigeon. Would not be a semi-functional nonentity like Joe Biden.
One remembers the Iranian hostage crisis that dragged on for more than a year during the Jimmy Carter administration. Diplomacy and a rescue attempt failed, but things changed when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election. On his inauguration day, as I recall, the Iranians decided they had better free their 53 American hostages. Imagine that. Reagan was “unpredictable,” too.
The Democrats have been trying, for years, to sell the absurd notion that Donald Trump is somehow a friend of, or even in the pocket of, Russia’s government. This theory never made any sense, and the fact that Russia made aggressive moves in Europe during the Obama administration and the Biden administration, but not while Trump was in the White House, obviously refutes the Democrats’ smear. But this latest story is one more reminder that the last thing Vladimir Putin wants to see is Donald Trump in the White House.
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