Some Pentagon officials believe Russia is testing President Donald Trump with aggressive moves across the globe. CNN reports.
Moscow recently deployed a banned land-based cruise missile, dispatched a spy ship up the Atlantic coast and buzzed an American warship in the Black Sea.
“They were likely intended to test the new administration,” one defense official told CNN.
“The Russians are doing different things to see how the new administration will respond,” a second defense official added.
The developments raise the question of how the new White House occupant will address Russian assertiveness and whether, after complimenting Russian President Vladimir Putin and playing down Russia’s adversarial relationship with the US, Trump will resort to any confrontational responses.
Trump, for his part, dismissed the idea that Russia was testing him and attributed its recent moves to Putin’s belief that the new US president was politically constrained and incapable of striking a deal with Russia.
“All of those things that you mentioned are very recent, because probably Putin assumes that he’s not going to be able to make a deal with me because it’s politically not popular for me to make a deal,” Trump said during a news conference Thursday.
In contrast, both defense officials noted that Russia’s military posture has become increasingly assertive in recent years and assessed that Moscow was likely to test any new administration regardless of its perceptions of the commander-in-chief’s latitude to cut a deal.
In the case of the spy ship currently off the coast of Virginia, the defense official said that its mission was likely planned before the election, as the ship left its home port near Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean in mid-December.
Analysts also agreed that the moves were intended to gauge the new White House, but they said the uptick in activity could be in part because they are taking an increasingly dim view of Trump’s likelihood of building a warmer relationship with Moscow.
“They are trying to figure out where they stand,” Magnus Nordenman, the director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Washington-based Atlantic Council, told CNN.
“Moscow is testing and prodding to see where they are,” he said.
Joerg Forbrig, a Berlin-based expert on Eastern European affairs at the German Marshall Fund, told CNN that Russia’s actions “are just the most recent in a long series of Russian military provocations vis-à-vis NATO member states.”
“That said, the latest posturing is certainly tailored specifically to the United States at its time of transition to a new administration,” he added.