How Putin Played Donald Trump and the USA
As explained in the book ‘Russian Roulette’
How did US-Russia relations get to where they are today? Here is a 21st-century story told in Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. It was published in 2018 with an epilogue added in 2020.
The Early 2000s
Chronologically, this story begins with George W. Bush saying in 2001 that he looked Putin “in the eye” and gained “a sense of his soul,” which was “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Then came the Kremlin’s assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Litvinenko had become a British citizen; Russian agents poisoned him with radioactive polonium. Russia also committed violence in Chechnya and invaded Georgia in 2008. Then there was a group of ten Russian agents who lived in the US for years, “blend[ing] into American society,” whom the FBI monitored until 2010 when they finally sent them home.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump worked on business dealings with Felix Sater, a Moscow-born mobster, in the early 2000s. They parted ways later that decade when…
