It’s not every day that the world watches a U.S. president take foreign policy advice from a Russian counterpart, but that’s exactly what transpired last Friday, August 22, 2025, when Russian President Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump that he lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election because it was “rigged through mail-in voting.” According to The Guardian, this conversation between two of the world’s most powerful leaders quickly took on outsized significance — not just for what was said, but for what happened next.
Three days after the exchange, on August 25, President Trump announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to eliminate mail-in balloting. That’s no small move: nearly a third of American voters rely on mail-in voting, and, as The Guardian notes, there’s no credible evidence linking this method to widespread election fraud. The abruptness of Trump’s response — and the fact that it echoed the advice of an authoritarian leader accused of orchestrating sham elections — left many observers stunned.
“In Donald Trump’s world there’s no significant distinction between what he does internationally and what he is doing domestically because all centers on himself. There’s no ideological through-line or consistency. It’s all about what serves his own personal interests,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, in remarks to The Guardian. Sykes’s comments reflect a growing concern among critics that Trump’s blending of domestic grievances with foreign policy goals is not just unconventional, but potentially dangerous.
This isn’t the first time Trump has blurred those lines. His approach to countries like El Salvador, Venezuela, and Cuba has often mixed foreign policy with appeals to domestic political constituencies — especially in states like Florida, where exile communities wield significant electoral influence. But Russia’s role in Trump’s political narrative has been singular. In 2016, he publicly called on Russians to hack his rival Hillary Clinton’s emails. Since then, he has repeatedly accused former President Barack Obama of “treason” for allegedly linking him to Russian election meddling, again without substantiation.
Last Friday’s summit in Anchorage, Alaska, between Trump and Putin was billed as a major diplomatic moment. But when Putin assured Trump that, had he won the 2020 election, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, it felt more like political theater than statecraft. Trump has wielded this talking point on the campaign trail and since returning to the White House in January, but for Putin to echo it publicly provided the kind of validation Trump appears to crave. Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, told The Guardian, “Donald Trump seems to have an inexplainable affinity for everything Vladimir Putin does and the way in which Russia’s elections are manipulated and not free and fair seems to be something Donald Trump aspires to to maintain power.”
Setmayer continued, “When Donald Trump echoes the sentiments of a murderous dictator, war criminal, enemy of the United States and decides to translate that into domestic American politics, it should raise alarms to everyone as to why he would want to emulate anything Vladimir Putin suggests.”
Trump’s tendency to bring domestic obsessions into international meetings has also posed challenges for foreign leaders. On August 18, during a high-profile meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump digressed into stories about law and order crackdowns in Washington, D.C., and discussed topics ranging from men’s and women’s sports to transgender rights, open borders, and crime. “He has a son who’s a great golfer,” Trump began, recounting a conversation about safety in the nation’s capital. The meeting, which should have focused on the war in Ukraine, instead veered into a monologue about domestic politics.
When asked by a reporter about his social media post on mail-in ballots, Trump acknowledged, “Well, that’s a very off topic,” but then launched into a lengthy answer that included his vow to terminate mail-in voting and a wide-ranging critique of Democrats. “Because with men and women’s sports, and with transgender for everybody, and open borders, and all of the horrible things, and now the new thing is, they love crime,” Trump said, according to The Guardian.
Trump also used the occasion to criticize his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, stating, “Look, this isn’t my war; this is Joe Biden’s war. Joe Biden, a corrupt politician, not a smart man – never was.” Zelenskyy, who previously praised Biden for his support of Ukraine, remained silent during the exchange. This public denigration of a fellow American president in front of a foreign leader marks a radical departure from tradition. As Joel Rubin, a former assistant deputy secretary of state, told The Guardian, “I find it shocking because American presidents historically leave other American presidents alone. They’ll criticise policies but they don’t go for personal taunts.” Rubin added, “America’s strength as a country when it comes to foreign policy is our consistency and bipartisan mindset and national patriotism. The denigrating of previous American presidents in front of international audiences is very stark and very different. Trump is doing something that nobody else has done before.”
Meanwhile, the backdrop to these political dramas is a broader struggle over Russia’s war in Ukraine and the effectiveness of Western sanctions. According to The New York Times, since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the United States has imposed sanctions on more than 6,000 individuals and companies linked to Russia’s war effort. Yet Russia, by some measures the most sanctioned country on earth, has shown little urgency to end its campaign.
Sanctions enforcement has proven tricky. Eight of the 10 largest settlements for global sanctions violations since 2014 involved financial institutions, but only two of those cases were related to Russia — one against a venture capital firm managing money for a Russian oligarch, and another against the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Most sanctioned entities are individuals or small shell companies; fewer than 30 large firms based outside Russia are on the list, and only five are financial firms.
Russia has managed to keep its economy afloat by deepening ties with India and China, whose large economies provide a crucial lifeline. Sanctioning major Chinese banks, experts warn, could trigger global financial instability, making them nearly “unsanctionable.” Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told The New York Times, “Sanctioning a large Chinese financial institution could lead to global financial instability.”
Resource constraints have also hampered enforcement. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which oversees sanctions, is adept at finding nefarious shell companies and individuals, but bringing cases against large banks is “a lot more difficult,” according to Kimberly Donovan, director of the economic statecraft initiative at the Atlantic Council. “Frankly it comes down to resources.”
Even when Russian banks are sanctioned and removed from systems like SWIFT, they find workarounds. VTB Bank, for example, has reportedly used Chinese payment platforms like Alipay to facilitate international transfers, effectively bypassing Western restrictions. In early 2025, then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr. placed nine Chinese companies involved in facilitating transactions with Russia on the sanctions list, but these were mostly shell companies and small trading houses, not major payment giants like Alipay.
All the while, business in Moscow appears to continue as usual. In April, Expo Electronica, a major trade show, featured companies like Hong Kong-based Allchips — already on the U.S. sanctions list — openly advertising advanced semiconductors. When asked about payment, Allchips representatives said they accepted dollars and Chinese renminbi through Alipay, or bank transfers to VTB accounts. Ant Group, which owns Alipay, denied any such relationship, but the ease with which sanctioned entities seem to operate highlights the persistent gaps in enforcement.
Europe has also tried to clamp down, placing sanctions on regional Chinese banks for facilitating Russian transactions. But, as Maria Snegovaya of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told The New York Times, Europe lacks the financial leverage to enforce sanctions globally: “They don’t really have a lot of mechanisms to make sure the sanctions are followed.”
In the end, the intersection of Trump’s unconventional diplomacy, the resilience of Russia’s economy under sanctions, and the complex web of global finance has created a landscape where old rules no longer seem to apply. The implications for American democracy, international norms, and the war in Ukraine are profound — and the world is watching closely.
