“The message is, if you want a deal, you’re going to crawl on your knees for it,” says Nina Khrushcheva, an authority on Russian politics and foreign affairs at the New School. “Putin feels he is starting out with Trump from a position of strength.”
That makes the Russian president an outlier among European leaders. On Wednesday, many of them issued flattering statements and promises to cooperate with the Trump administration. But the Kremlin noted drily that the U.S. and Russia remain at war, “both directly and indirectly," while Putin’s conditions for ending that war, his spokesman said, “remain unchanged, and are well known in Washington.”