Christmas for Putin

Vladimir Putin disappeared a couple of weeks ago for a quick retreat to an isolated monastery on a lake just north of St Petersburg. He must have prayed really hard while he was there because it seems all his newly discovered orthodox Christmases have come at once - in the form of Donald Trump.

Russians have long been of the view that the Republican US presidential nominee would improve relations between the two countries - based largely on the perception that Republican leaders and their Russian counterparts tend to get on better - but Trump seems to have outdone them all.

Firstly he's sent troubling signals about the future of NATO indicating he may only come to the aid of a threatened NATO ally if they've paid their dues in full.

In an interview with the "New York Times" about the US response to Russian aggression against the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Trump said he'd only help once he'd checked the payment sheet to see if they'd met their obligation to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense.

The end of NATO?

It's a message that would have made Putin very happy indeed since only five of the 28 NATO countries are in that basket. According to Reuters, Robert Hunter, a former US ambassador to NATO under the Clinton administration, said "it's the end of NATO."

So while Estonia might be breathing a sigh of relief since it is up-to-date with its payments, Latvia and Lithuania won't be feeling quite as comfortable as they contemplate Putin weighing up his chances of success in reclaiming the former territories from the Soviet era and effectively turning Europe into something that resembles more of a Swiss cheese than a cohesive whole.

But if that weren't enough, Trump then invited or encouraged Russian hackers to continue their probe into the Democratic National Committee's missing emails.

While countries do look at each other's stuff - as the US was caught doing to Germany a couple of years ago - the information isn't usually dumped onto a website for the world to see so that it would influence public opinion and affect the political discourse.

There's been much discussion about Putin's dislike of the Clintons and this being an act of revenge for the US criticism of the last Russian presidential election process in 2011. His preference for Trump has also been discussed as he once called him a "very colorful and talented man," but that does not necessarily mean he wants him as his US counterpart.

The fact that US cyberexperts seem to have uncovered such a large set of digital breadcrumbs that lead supposedly to the Kremlin's door seems a bit incongruous with Russia's usual modus operandi. It usually orchestrates larger-than-life plots whose trails usually come to an end nearby but not at the actual doorstep, as it diminishes their claims of so-called plausible deniability.

Although irrespective of where the trail leads, Russia is a master of denial, plausible or otherwise. (Think the shooting down of the MH17 flight, the Russian troops in Donbass in eastern Ukraine who were allegedly acting on their own initiative, the state-sponsored doping scandal that no one knew anything about, and those armed troops in Crimea who apparently weren't really Russian even though their trucks and uniforms were Russian but had the insignias covered up.)

Recognizing Crimea

And now Trump has dropped another bombshell, this time on Crimea. Asked at a press conference if he'd recognize the annexed state as Russian and lift the sanctions, he replied: "Yes. We would be looking at that."

While some may say the "looking" referred to him trying to find Crimea on a map, it's a comment that brings us back to where we started. At a time when the EU is trying desperately to hold itself together in the wake of Brexit, the rise of far-right groups and a spate of "Islamic State"-backed attacks, the last thing it needs is a potential US president holding up a green light to a Russian leader who knows how to seize an expansionist opportunity when he sees it.

Already there are rumblings in Donbass that indicate an escalation in fighting, and the EU and US are otherwise occupied with their own problems. It wouldn't take much for Russia - feeling threatened by NATO expansion and backed by a public that now believes the west is actually against it - to think it wants its former Baltic buffer zone back. A divided Europe without the backing of its largest and strongest NATO ally would leave it ripe for the picking.

'Die for Danzig. No!'

And Republican Trump ally and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has explained exactly how this will happen: just as it did in Crimea. Speaking on the CBS This Morning program, he said: "Estonia is in the suburbs of St Petersburg. The Russians aren't going to necessarily come across the [Estonian] border militarily. The Russians will do what they did in Ukraine. Forty percent of Estonia is Russian. They're suddenly going to say they're being mistreated. They're going to have a militia. I'm not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St Petersburg."

The comments are reminiscent of the French neo-socialist writer Marcel Déat, who wrote an article in 1939 urging further appeasement of Hitler by giving back to Germany the former Prussian region of Danzig, which was within Polish territory and administered by the League of Nations. Déat coined the phrase "Die for Danzig. No!"

Shortly afterwards Hitler - followed by the Soviet Union, which had been promised the territories of the Baltics, Finland and a swath of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - invaded Poland and all hell broke out in Europe for the second time. Let's hope there won't be a third.