Trusting Russia's autocrat Vladimir Putin on Ukraine or anything of any significance to him is like trusting his role model, Joseph Stalin.

Life under Stalin-imposed communism in Poland and years of news reporting have taught me that any trust put in the ex-KGB spy currently calling the shots in the Kremlin is going to end badly for President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Vance, the Republican Party and the American people.

Consider what President Franklin Roosevelt's naive trust in Stalin did to millions of East Europeans who lost their lives or spent decades in fear and poverty under communism after FDR had sold them down the river to the Soviet dictator.

The Yalta Agreement he signed in 1944 with Stalin failed to bring lasting peace as FDR had naively hoped it would. Russia and communist China initiated proxy wars with the U.S. in Korea and Vietnam, in which tens of thousands of Americans were to lose their lives. At the same time, the Red Army brutally suppressed anti-Soviet uprisings in East Germany and Hungary and the peaceful Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.

Putin, who had served the brutal Soviet regime as a spy, knows how to manipulate naive leaders, journalists, and ordinary citizens of Western nations. He learned his craft from his KGB spymasters, who learned it from Lenin and Stalin. It is indeed puzzling why some conservative Republicans allowed themselves to........

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