It is the scene that opened the summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025. A truly bizarre scene. Trump arrives on Air Force One, walks down the steps and moves along the red carpet. At that moment, Putin appears at the door of his own plane. And then Trump starts to applaud.
Putin is a murderer, wanted by the International Criminal Court. He is the man who started the largest and deadliest war in Europe since 1945. And yet, the president of the United States stands in front of him and applauds him.
He essentially kept the same stance afterward. “No, we don’t want a ceasefire,” Trump said during the summit, abandoning the previous American position. “We need a comprehensive agreement, and then the fighting can stop,” he added.
In other words, he adopted the Russian line. Everything he has done since returning to the White House, from cutting off direct military aid to throwing Volodymyr Zelensky out of the Oval Office during their infamous meeting in February 2025, from constantly repeating Kremlin disinformation to the recent “huge” deal he announced for buying diesel from Russia, benefits Moscow. So it is time to ask the million-dollar question (again). Is Trump Putin’s man? A new “Manchurian Candidate”?
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A Decade of Close Observation
We know that the Czechoslovak secret police were monitoring Trump and his family as early as the 1970s, when he married a woman from the other side of the Iron Curtain: Ivana Trump.
Their interest grew in the mid-1980s, when Trump began expressing a desire to get into politics. In 1987, he and Ivana were even invited to Moscow and Leningrad by the Soviet ambassador in Washington at the time. Trump later made several business trips to Russia, including one in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant, without his then and current wife.
Of course the KGB or the FSB would have watched Trump, just as they would any American staying in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, Luke Harding, an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Guardian, told the website openDemocracy. There will be, he added, recordings of Trump, including footage secretly filmed in his bedroom. There will be an extensive profile of his personality, as well as agent reports going back decades. The point, he says, is that Putin knows exactly what this file contains, and Trump knows that Putin knows.
In reality, there are many theories. Two former Russian spies have claimed that Trump was blackmailed during his 1987 visit to the Soviet Union and that he was given the code name “Krasnov.”
Writing in Foreign Policy last year, British journalist and author Edward Lucas did not rule out the possibility that Trump gave in at the time to a combination of flattery and blackmail, a favorite KGB method. Many other Westerners, he noted, had fallen for similar tactics. He also did not rule out the possibility that Russia funneled money to Trump in the 1990s to rescue his business empire, which was then on the verge of collapse.
It is also clear that he has surrounded himself with ruthless and eccentric figures who would set off alarms at any counterintelligence agency.
A Closer Look at the Person
But was he actually handled as an agent? Can anyone imagine Trump arriving on time for a secret meeting? Remembering the location of a dead drop for secretly handing over information or material? Writing reports? Using a codebook correctly? Keeping secrets? Following orders? With his unpredictable and short-tempered nature, he would be a nightmare for any handler.
The most likely and simplest explanation, Lucas wrote, is that Trump is exactly what he appears to be: a fanatical admirer of Vladimir Putin, with an insatiable greed. He may be working to Russia’s benefit without being its “agent” in the strict sense of the word. He is simply fascinated by the Russian president’s authoritarian model of government, and by the way the regime allows the Kremlin’s inner circle, and Putin himself, to turn political power into personal wealth. Take the diesel deal: for the American president’s inner circle, it promises opportunities for corruption on a scale of billions of dollars.
If you force Ukraine to surrender, we will make you unimaginably rich: that is the deal Putin and company are offering Trump and company. And they don’t even need kompromat to accept it, just a few simple, ordinary deadly sins.