WASHINGTON — After Russian forces seized three Ukrainian ships in November and threatened to turn the Sea of Azov into a Russian lake, Trump administration officials outlined possible responses like imposing additional sanctions, sending ships to make port calls or deploying monitors.
Two months later, President Trump has not taken significant action despite widespread support within his administration, nor have the European allies. In Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin’s Kremlin, rather than being deterred, has grown so emboldened that it is talking again about dismantling Ukraine as an independent state.
Mr. Trump’s approach toward Russia has attracted new attention with recent reports that the F.B.I. in 2017 opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president was acting on Russia’s behalf, that he has gone to unusual lengths to conceal the details of his meetings with Mr. Putin and that he threatened to pull out of NATO. The president’s lawyer revealed on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s proposed skyscraper in Moscow was under discussion all the way through the November 2016 election.
Mr. Trump has adamantly insisted that there was “no collusion” with Moscow during his campaign and that he has never worked for Russia. He regularly tries to dispel suspicions by declaring that he has done more to counter Russian aggression than other recent presidents have. “I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton,” he wrote on Twitter a week ago.
He has a point. His administration has taken actions that went beyond those of his most recent predecessors, including sanctions, diplomatic expulsions and increased military support for Eastern Europe. His administration has supplied Ukraine with defensive weapons that President Barack Obama refused to provide and announced that it would scrap a nuclear arms treaty in retaliation for Russian cheating.
Yet in at least some of those cases, according to current and former administration officials, Mr. Trump has gone along with such actions only reluctantly or under pressure from advisers or Congress. He has left it to subordinates to publicly criticize Russian actions while personally expressing admiration for Mr. Putin and eagerness to be friends. His recent decision to pull out of Syria was seen as a victory for Russia. And as in the latest Ukraine confrontation, he has for now at least given Moscow a pass.
“You see a policy where the government is pursuing one policy and the president is not with that policy,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine now at Stanford University. “And although he’s claimed he’s done things that make him tougher than other presidents, my impression is that some of these things he’s done he may not even understand them.”
Some analysts more sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s position said other presidents had also tried to maintain friendly relations with leaders of adversarial powers even as their administrations simultaneously applied pressure, a good-cop, bad-cop approach intended to preserve the possibility of improving relations.
“The administration’s policy on Russia — and on China and on North Korea and on Iran — has been tougher than many of his predecessors,” said Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
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