Eli Lake, Columnist

Who’s Appeasing Putin Now?

Biden’s failure to forcefully confront Russia on Ukraine and other matters puts Democrats in an awkward position.

December 17, 2021 at 3:00 AM EST

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Who’s appeasing who?
Photographer: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP

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On the campaign trail in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden posed as hawk on Russia. In response to reports (later discredited) that then-President Donald Trump had ignored intelligence suggesting Russia had paid for bounties on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Biden declared that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin.”

Biden’s attitude was partly explained by his party’s obsession with the (also discredited) theory that Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election. And Trump’s own inexplicable sycophancy toward Russian President Vladimir Putin bolstered this Democratic narrative. So it’s understandable that some voters believed Biden would take a harder line on Putin than Trump.

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