On Oct. 9, President Donald Trump announced that Russia would supply nearly five million tons of diesel to American and global markets, and the Treasury licensed the trade shortly afterward. The next day he said it was time for Ukraine to get a new president, and demanded that Kyiv stop striking Russian refineries while making no matching demand of Moscow over Ukraine's power grid. On Oct. 16, two days before its tariffs on buyers of Russian energy were due to take effect, he waived the main provisions of the Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, a law he had signed on Sept. 18.

Seoul, meanwhile, has recalled its ambassador to Ukraine and is withdrawing about half of its embassy staff in Kyiv, although it says its aid to Ukraine will continue. The quarrel began on Sept. 23, when Zelensky told the UN General Assembly that Ukraine had handed two captured North Korean soldiers to Seoul. South Korea says both sides had agreed to keep the transfer secret, and Ukraine denies that any such agreement existed. Seoul did not mean any of this as a favor to Washington. The effect does not depend on intent, because an Asian democracy publicly breaking with Kyiv lowers what Trump pays at home for turning toward Moscow.

The first time I walked into the headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service at Lubyanka, every instinct told me I was entering the wrong building.

I was the FBI Legal Attaché in Moscow. The Cold War had ended, but decades of suspicion between our institutions had not. Cooperation with the FSB did not come naturally, nor did trust.