Eli Lake, Columnist

Ukraine's Top Spy Is Pleased With Trump

The president's Putin-friendly noises don't drown out the sounds of military aid and intelligence cooperation.

February 7, 2018 at 8:11 PM UTC

Corrected

February 14, 2018 at 1:18 PM UTC

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.

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Vasyl Hrytsak is the last person you would expect to praise President Donald Trump for his administration's approach to Russia. As the director of the Security Service of Ukraine, the country's spy service, he is intimately familiar with Russian predations in his own country. And yet, Trump often sounds oblivious—at best—to the Russian threat.

Last summer, Trump agreed to a joint U.S.-Russian commission to examine cyber-threats, a ridiculous conceit considering that Russia hacked Democrats in 2016 to help him win the White House. The proposal has mercifully died on the vine.