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Last spring, the Kremlin added a new rhetorical weapon to its regular barrages against President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
“We are aware that the legitimacy of the current head of state has expired,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said of the Ukrainian leader in May 2024, two months after orchestrating his own latest rubber-stamp re-election at home.
Those stilted words kicked off a concerted campaign by Moscow to tarnish Mr. Zelensky as an impostor incapable of signing a peace deal unless presidential elections were held in Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky had remained in power when his term expired because Ukraine prohibits elections under martial law. No matter. By Wednesday, President Trump had picked up Mr. Putin’s message.
“A Dictator without Elections,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his Truth Social account, in a scathing attack on the Ukrainian leader. It came a day after Mr. Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian security council and a former president of Russia, said he agreed with Mr. Trump about the Ukrainian leader “200 percent.” He suggested that Moscow could not believe its luck with Washington’s about-face, throwing into stark relief how completely Mr. Trump had adopted the Kremlin’s messaging.
It was not the first time that Mr. Trump had picked up and repeated a questionable talking point of a strongman leader who had won his sympathies. During Mr. Trump’s first term, such interlocutors sometimes guided the president handily toward taking up their positions, even if those stances contradicted Mr. Trump’s own advisers and intelligence agencies.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, for example, regularly steered Mr. Trump toward his positions in calls and interactions, ultimately getting the U.S. president to move American forces out of the way while Turkey attacked the Kurds in northern Syria. The Kurds had been Washington’s main partners in the campaign against the Islamic State.
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