At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, then US President Donald Trump secretly sent special covid tests to Vladimir Putin, who was panicking about the disease. After leaving the White House, they spoke on the phone several times and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told his American counterpart Austin to stop threatening him, a new book by elite journalist Bob Woodward reveals.
The famous American investigative reporter Bob Woodward interviewed hundreds of people close to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The result is a cracking book called War. In the United States, it is published next Tuesday, twenty days before the presidential election.
Woodward, made famous by the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, says in the book that Putin was so afraid of the coronavirus that he accepted Trump’s offer to send him a test kit unavailable at the time to the Kremlin. And moreover, he asked the then president not to talk about it publicly. “I don’t care,” Trump is said to have said, to which Putin replied that he would not want the release of the information to harm the president in any way. CNN, which has it, quotes from the new book.
Citing an unnamed adviser, Woodward writes that after the end of his mandate in January 2021, Trump spoke to Putin by phone a total of seven times from his Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, the last time at the beginning of this year. But the journalist admits that he could not verify the information from other sources. Trump’s chief of staff, Stephen Miller, told him he was not aware of such calls. The director of US intelligence, Avril Haines, responded that it was not her place to comment on who Trump had or hadn’t talked to.
The New York Times wrote that former US presidents sometimes talk on the phone with politicians of allied or friendly countries who are still in office, but this is unusual for Russian politicians.
Woodward devotes one chapter of the book to the events that preceded the Russian aggression against Ukraine in February 2022. According to him, the American intelligence services knew with certainty about the impending invasion since October, because they had their high-ranking source directly in the Kremlin.
The renowned reporter also reports that in the fall of 2022, the White House feared that Putin would use a tactical nuclear bomb in Ukraine. The situation of the Russians on the battlefield at that time looked tragic: they withdrew from Kharkov and part of the Kherson region, they failed to capture Kiev.
Eighty-one-year-old Bob Woodward publishes a new book, The War, in the Simon & Schuster publishing house. It is expected to become a bestseller. | Photo: Reuters
At the time, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu in Moscow to warn him that Russia’s use of nuclear weapons would lead to a reevaluation of the US policy of restraint towards Russia. “I don’t like being threatened,” Woodward quotes Shoigu as saying. “Mr. Minister, I stand at the head of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I make no threats,” Austin countered in the heated phone call.
At the time, the Americans tried to dissuade Putin from detonating a nuclear bomb on several levels. Biden even called Chinese President Xi Jinping and asked him to go easy on the Russians. Then, in a speech on November 4, 2022, Si publicly called on “all countries” to refrain from using nuclear weapons.
As for Biden, the reporter says based on testimony that the current president does not go far for vulgarities. He called the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a son of a bitch” and he expresses himself similarly about Donald Trump. He never mentioned him by name, always referring to him publicly as his predecessor. In private, he refers to him as “fucking asshole”.
A spokesman for the former president, Stephen Cheung, called Woodward’s book a bunch of made-up stories and garbage. Both Biden and Trump declined to grant Woodward an interview.
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