How Putin has used flattery and deception to 'fool' five US presidents

By John Lyons, ABC

Analysis: Vladimir Putin has won both the physical war against Ukraine and the psychological war against Donald Trump. So far, at least.

Only a year ago, the United States was urging countries around the world to arrest the Russian president should he touch down on their soil.

Then-US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, called on the 123 states that are signatories the International Criminal Court (ICC) to arrest Putin for the alleged war crime of illegally deporting children from Ukraine to Crimea or Russia.

Then-US president Joe Biden supported the ICC arrest warrant, declaring Putin to be guilty.

What a difference a year and a new president make. Now, rather than facing an arrest warrant, Putin is about to be feted on American soil, given equal status at a summit in Alaska with Trump.

Putin will be a guest of the US, and the photos that emerge from the meeting will be used by Russia's state media to argue that Putin was right to invade Ukraine.

A master of mind games

The Russian propaganda line is already that this summit has proved Putin is not the war criminal that the Biden administration tried to portray. Instead, he is a welcome guest of Trump.

Putin, this master of mind games who learnt his craft in the ruthless culture of the KGB, has manipulated yet another US president.

In the world of diplomacy, Putin has won as he's back in from the cold. When European leaders continue to urge sanctions against him, Trump has invited him back to the US.

And on the battlefield, Putin will have won the war if by invading Ukraine and killing civilians for more than two years, he ends up with almost 20 percent of Ukraine.

In the lead-up to the summit, Trump has talked about the need to "swap" land.

What's there for Ukraine to swap? It's lost about 20 percent of its land to Russia as it slowly loses the war.

Even up until the days before the summit was set to begin, Russia was taking small pockets in the east of Ukraine.

Now Putin gets a prize - a summit that catapults him back onto the world stage. For the past two years, most world leaders have treated him as a pariah for illegally invading another country.

For Trump - who these days clearly enjoys questions from some of the fawning members of the US media about whether he would accept a Nobel Peace Prize - it is a photo opportunity with a man for whom he has an unexplained fascination and admiration.

The Nobel narrative never mentions that it is only with Trump's endorsement that unspeakable suffering, trauma and starvation is being committed by Israel in Gaza, often with US bombs.

No real victory for Ukraine

And while Putin and Trump both carve out for themselves some winnings from the injustice inflicted upon Ukraine, Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and the people of Ukraine lose - their country has shrunk as a result of Russia's military might and violence.

While there can be no real victory out of this summit for Ukraine, Ukrainians are fatigued and traumatised - they have been losing this war slowly.

The only consolation to any end to the war will be that their young men and women will no longer be dying in the frozen fields of the front line and they can slowly try to rebuild a shattered economy and country.

Unless Putin decides he wants more and his army returns.

The biggest winner, of course, is set to be Putin. During his years in the KGB, one of the specialties of Lieutenant Colonel Putin was personality profiling - before recruiting someone, Putin needed to understand their motivations and their vulnerabilities.

He appears to have identified a weakness in Trump: the need to be at the centre of the world stage. Trump clearly revels in the big events, being at the centre of international attention.

And so Putin - who daily orders the killing of Ukrainian civilians with his missiles and drones - is set to join Trump for yet another photo opportunity summit.

This is classic Putin. He's manipulated or treated with contempt five US presidents - Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden.

Now he has a second look at Trump.

'I was able to get a sense of his soul'

Each US president has come to power convinced that they could develop a working relationship with Putin - that they could trust him and work with him.

The most dramatic example was Bush, who invited Putin to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 2001. It seems almost incomprehensible today, given the tensions and suspicion between Washington and Moscow, but Putin spent the night at the Bush ranch.

The next morning, they visited Crawford High School - an unforgettable memory for the students of this small-town US school. Standing alongside the Russian leader, Bush told the student assembly about the evening the two had just spent together: "We had a little Texas barbecue, pecan pie, a little Texas music."

Bush's assessment of his fellow president after their first face-to-face meeting was glowing. "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul."

Many Russians were mystified, even amused, by this assessment.

As Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats later told PBS's Frontline programme: "He [Putin] was trained not to reveal his, so to say, soul, if he has any. His life experience didn't allow him to reveal any inner him, any true him, to any representative of the West. [The] West, for him, remains to be the enemy. And the United States, as the leader of the West, is the enemy number one."

It did not take long for Bush to become disenchanted.

Despite Bush's urging, Putin made clear he had ambitions to invade both Georgia and Ukraine.

Soon after, he invaded Georgia.

Bush would be outraged some time later when Putin leant over to him at one of their meetings and said under his breath: "Ukraine is not a real country."

The bitter breakdown in the Bush-Putin relationship was on display at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Frontline reported that the two had a hostile conversation as they sat watching the Olympics and Bush would later tell his staff: "You know, I don't know how, but we've lost him."

Trump says Putin has 'fooled' many US presidents

In recent weeks, as he too has been "losing" Putin, Trump has tried to turn up the financial pressure on Russia.

He's been doing this by threatening tariffs on those who buy goods from Russia - India being his first big target. He is planning to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on all goods from India entering the US - taking India's tariff to 50 percent.

This has been imposed because India has continued to buy oil from Russia.

Trump goes into this Alaska meeting knowing how good Putin is at mind games and strategy. He's observed himself how Putin has "fooled" many of his predecessors, and has talked about how he can have what appear to be constructive conversations with Putin about Ukraine and only hours later Putin's forces will pound targets inside Ukraine.

"After that happens three or four times, you say that talk doesn't mean anything," he says.

"My conversations with him are always very pleasant - they're very lovely conversations and then the missiles go off that night. I go home, I tell the First Lady: 'I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation', and she says: 'Oh really, another city (in Ukraine) was just hit.' I don't want to say he's an assassin, but he's a tough guy. It's been proven over the years - he's fooled a lot of people. He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn't fool me but what I do say is that at a certain point ultimately talk doesn't talk, there's got to be action. There's got to be results."

Having laid out the long list of US presidents who have been fooled, the question is whether Trump is about to cement his place alongside them.

-ABC