President Donald Trump’s decision to halt American military aid to Ukraine is one of the most dramatic US foreign policy shifts of recent years. The US has not only effectively changed sides in an ongoing war, it has also seemingly cast aside decades of alignment with Europe against Russian aggression, effectively taking Russia’s side in the larger geopolitical struggle.

For some, Trump’s move will come as no surprise. From the time he defended Russia’s human rights record by pointing out that the US isn’t “so innocent” to the time he took Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word over his own intelligence agencies, his rhetoric has given more than enough ammunition over the years to opponents who portray him as the Russian leader’s “puppet,” as Hillary Clinton once famously described him.

But despite Russia’s much-investigated interference on his behalf in the 2016 election, and despite his frequent expressions of affection for Putin, Trump’s actual policies during his first term in office were not particularly “pro-Russian.” After Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, there were literal champagne toasts on the floor of Russia’s parliament to celebrate what was expected to be a new golden age of US-Russia relations. But the good feelings were short-lived.

Despite what some Trump officials may have promised the Kremlin, Trump did not lift any significant sanctions on Russia and in fact applied dozens of new ones.

The Trump administration signed off on the sale of Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine 2019, after the Obama administration had declined. The effectiveness of these weapons against Russia’s armored vehicles following the full-scale invasion in 2022 gave them near-mythical status in Ukraine. Trump’s more hawkish senior officials and members of Congress were often able to get their way on Russia policy, despite the president’s own preferences.

By the time of the 2020 election, the consensus in Moscow was that Trump hadn’t made much of a difference and that relations would continue to be bad, no matter who was in the White House. This time around, Russian leaders reacted a lot more cautiously to Trump’s reelection, with the foreign ministry saying that a bipartisan anti-Russia consensus predominated in Washington and they didn’t expect the new president to change that.

That, however, was

© Vox