Trump and Putin Find Common Ground on One Issue: Biden

President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did not agree on a cease-fire to the war in Ukraine during their meeting in Alaska. But they did agree on something else: They both despise Joe Biden.

During their private meeting and their public appearance in Anchorage on Friday, both leaders blamed Mr. Biden for the war in Ukraine, never mind that Mr. Putin was the one who ordered troops to invade his neighbor and keeps authorizing strikes against civilian targets.

The Russian president complained that Mr. Biden did not accede to Russian demands before the full-scale invasion three and a half years ago, and he played to the current president’s ego by agreeing that the war would not have happened had Mr. Trump still been in office in 2022. By Mr. Trump’s account, Mr. Putin behind closed doors also endorsed the lie that Mr. Trump actually won the 2020 election, only to have it stolen by Democrats.

“I think that he respects our country now,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin during a post-summit interview on Fox News. “He didn’t respect it under Biden, I can tell you that. He had no respect for it. I was so happy when he said this would have never happened. This — all those lives would be saved if they had a competent — if we had a competent president.”

Indeed, even though he expressed frustration with Mr. Putin in the weeks leading up to the Alaska meeting over the war in Ukraine, Mr. Trump has still never publicly said anything as harsh about the Russian leader as he does with great regularity about Mr. Biden — or, for that matter, about former President Barack Obama and even, to a lesser extent, former President George W. Bush.

In that, too, Mr. Putin is like-minded. He has long nursed grievances against Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, often venting during interviews and meetings about how he believes they mistreated him when they were in office. Mr. Putin, who has dealt with five American presidents during his quarter-century in power, has come to believe that they are all more or less alike in disregarding Russian concerns, according to people who have heard his rants — all, that is, except Mr. Trump.

The shared animosity toward Mr. Biden provided a moment of enemy-of-my-enemy convergence between the two leaders during their Alaska encounter. And while analysts said it reflected genuine resentment on Mr. Putin’s part, it also underscored his penchant for finding ways to play to the values and vanities of his foreign counterparts.

A former K.G.B. officer once charged with managing agents during a Cold War stint in East Germany, Mr. Putin has long demonstrated a skill at adapting to the particulars of the person across the table. He does his research. He reads his briefings. He figures out what matters to them. And he finds ways of currying favor when it suits his interests.

When he hosted Strobe Talbott, a Russia specialist serving as President Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Mr. Putin made a point of mentioning Fyodor Tyutchev and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian poets Mr. Talbott studied at Yale and Oxford. “He wanted his visitor to know that he’d done his homework,” Mr. Talbott wrote in his memoir.

When Mr. Bush, a man known for his deep faith, first met Mr. Putin, a man not known for his deep faith, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2001, the Russian made a deep impression on the American by relating a story about a cross his mother had given him as a child.

Mr. Putin likewise played to European leaders, at least in his early years in office. But he also used their personal vulnerabilities against them when he thought it would give him an advantage.

Knowing that Angela Merkel, then the chancellor of Germany, was afraid of dogs after once being bitten, Mr. Putin brought his black Labrador to a 2007 meeting and let it sniff around his uncomfortable visitor. Ms. Merkel deemed it a power play and later wrote that Mr. Putin was “enjoying the situation.”

As for Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin understands his insecurity and need for validation. During a meeting in Japan in 2019, according to people in the room at the time, he listened as Mr. Trump boasted that Poland planned to name a military base “Fort Trump” and Israel planned to name a settlement “Trump Heights.” Mr. Putin replied drolly, “Maybe they should just name Israel after you, Donald.”

Mr. Putin certainly knew what he was doing in Alaska when he aired his disdain for Mr. Biden, grousing that the previous president did not defer to Russian concerns during the months leading up to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“I tried to convince my former U.S. counterpart that we should not bring the situation to a point fraught with serious repercussions in the form of hostilities, and I said directly at the time that it would be a big mistake,” Mr. Putin said, eliding over his own decision to order the invasion.

Whether that is true is hard to say. Mr. Trump acts as if the war started with the 2022 invasion, but in fact it began in 2014 when Mr. Putin seized Crimea and territory in eastern Ukraine. The war persisted at a simmering level throughout Mr. Trump’s first term and Russia never backed off even with Mr. Trump in office.

If it is true that Russia would not have mounted its full-scale invasion in 2022 had Mr. Trump still been president, Democrats maintain that it would have been because he was willing to let Mr. Putin dominate Ukraine without having to use force.

But Mr. Putin’s statement on Friday was just what Mr. Trump wanted to hear. He has taken to calling the Ukraine conflict “Biden’s war” — not “Putin’s war” — as he deflects blame for failing to fulfill his campaign promise to end the fighting within 24 hours of taking office in January.

During his interview on Fox with Sean Hannity after the Alaska meeting, Mr. Trump described more efforts by Mr. Putin to stroke him behind closed doors.

“You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things,” Mr. Trump related. “He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’ He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”

According to Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin continued: “‘You won that election by so much.’ And that’s how he got it. He said, ‘And if you would have won, we wouldn’t have had a war. You’d have all these millions of people alive now instead of dead.’ And he said, ‘And you lost it because of mail-in voting. It was a rigged election.’”

In fact, dozens of countries around the world have allowed some form of postal voting — including Russia, where Mr. Putin signed a law permitting it in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Trump himself has cast ballots by mail. No independent investigation has found widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.

Whether Mr. Putin weighed in on domestic American campaign processes in quite the way Mr. Trump described is unknown. Mr. Trump has proved to be an unreliable narrator of events, often describing private conversations that supposedly substantiate his view of the world.

But if Mr. Putin gave the impression that he agreed that the 2020 election was rigged, he was appealing to one of Mr. Trump’s signature fixations — and successfully changed the subject from the demands that he stop the war.

During the interview with Mr. Hannity, Mr. Trump used the term “mail-in voting” 13 times and the word “rigged” another three times. The word “cease-fire” never passed his lips.