MOSCOW — From Moscow to Washington to capitals in between, the past few days showcased the way President Vladimir Putin of Russia nimbly exploits differences between the United States and its allies — yet also accentuated where he falls short.
President Trump on Friday had barely finished announcing new sanctions on Turkey before Putin was on the phone with his Turkish counterpart, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It was vintage Putin, exploiting an opportunity to divide the West. Yet recent events also highlighted the downside to Putin’s geopolitical escapades. The Western sanctions he hoped to get lifted have only been tightened, pushing the ruble down to its lowest levels in years.
At home, Putin’s standing with Russians is suffering.
For all the strategic success Putin has had — including diminishing NATO and the European Union by bolstering populist governments in Europe as well as Middle East autocrats — he has failed to persuade or pressure the West to lift successive waves of US and European economic sanctions imposed on Russia since its 2014 annexation of Crimea.
In fact, the State Department threatened last week to enact yet another round of such measures, just days after the US Senate brandished its own.
The European Union, some of whose members had signaled in the past few years that they were ready to consider granting Moscow some relief, has held tough on sanctions, especially in the wake of the British government’s finding that Russia was responsible for an attempted assassination on British soil using a banned nerve agent.
Putin could certainly claim a tactical victory after his call to Turkey. Erdogan, whose country is a NATO member, soon crowed that Turkey’s growing economic and military relations with Russia “make us stronger,’’ while he fulminated against the “economic war’’ waged by Washington.
But the failure to make progress in freeing the Russian economy from the sanctions is a setback for Putin both domestically and globally.
In Trump, Putin and others in the Kremlin thought that they had a get-out-of-sanctions-free card. The first summit between the two leaders, in Helsinki last month, reinforced Russian expectations that Trump would fulfill his campaign promise to mend ties.
Much to the Kremlin’s dismay, however, the Trump administration has vacillated.
Trump repeatedly promises improved ties with Moscow, but senior officials in his own administration and congressional leaders from both parties continue to threaten new sanctions and other chastisements.
The Kremlin’s standard response since the Crimea annexation has been to rally Russians around the flag, depicting the country as a besieged fortress. After four years, however, ordinary Russians find that formula tiresome, analysts said, and Putin’s declining popularity can be attributed partly to his inability to mend fences with the West.
“People are saying, ‘Please maintain Russia as a great power, but not at the expense of our income,’ ’’ said Lev D. Gudkov, director of the Levada Center, an independent polling organization. “When they started to sense that Putin’s foreign policy became too expensive, the attitude began to change.’’
Initially, it seemed that the Helsinki talks opened the door to Russian-US cooperation on issues such as the wars in Syria and Ukraine, global terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.
Instead, Trump’s cozy attitude toward Putin backfired at home and the confrontation deepened.
First, the United States arrested a Russian citizen, Maria Butina, on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
Then a bipartisan group of senators, dismayed that Trump had not publicly confronted Putin over Russia’s election meddling, drafted a bill that would limit the operations in the United States of Russian state-owned banks and that would impede their use of the dollar.
On Wednesday, the State Department said it would impose new sanctions by the end of August in response to the attempted assassination in March of a former Russian spy living in England and his daughter.
