Vladimir Putin helped convince Trump to sour on Ukraine: report

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin successfully convinced President Donald Trump to turn on Ukraine according to a bombshell new report published by The Washington Post on Monday.

"President Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for information he could use against political rivals came as he was being urged to adopt a hostile view of that country by its regional adversaries, including Russian President Vladi­mir Putin," the newspaper reported, citing "current and former U.S. officials."

"Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said," the newspaper reported.

"Neither of those foreign leaders specifically encouraged Trump to see Ukraine as a potential source of damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, nor did they describe Kyiv as complicit in an unsubstantiated 2016 election conspiracy, officials said. But their disparaging depictions of Ukraine reinforced Trump’s perceptions of the country and fed a dysfunctional dynamic in which White House officials struggled to persuade Trump to support the fledgling government in Kyiv instead of exploiting it for political purposes," the newspaper explained.

The newspaper reported that the role of Putin and Orban was described in closed-door congressional testimony by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent.

"Kent cited the influence of those leaders as a factor that helped sour Trump on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the months leading up to their July 25 phone call — a conversation that triggered an extraordinary whistleblower complaint as well as a House impeachment inquiry," The Post reported.