In the years since the Trump-Russia investigation began, it has become apparent what Putin was trying to accomplish by meddling in the US election to help Trump. He is determined to rebuild a Russian empireone similar in scale to the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states during the Cold War. He has worked steadily on his imperial project since consolidating his power in Moscow in the early 2000s, and has already sabotaged attempts to build a democracy in Belarus by helping to install a pro-Russian dictator there, while also engaging in a long time. – running a campaign to do the same in the nation of Georgia.

His main target now is Ukraine, a democracy that is eager to join the European Union and NATO.

In 2014, Putin caught the West by surprise by suddenly seizing Crimea from Ukraine, and in 2022 he launched a the large-scale invasion of Ukrainea brutal war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Putin never got over Russia’s defeat in the Cold Warand his ambition is to make Russia a real superpower again. That means recapturing former Soviet republics like Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine is just the first part of his long-term plan. Putin also wants to regain control of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which were once part of the Soviet Union, and eventually wants to expand Moscow’s sphere of influence over former Warsaw Pact satellite countries from Eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Czech Republic and Slovakia. If he stays in power long enough, he may even go for the grand prize: retaking that part of Germany that was once East Germany. All this may seem far-fetched, but it’s only 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a time when Putin was a young KGB officer stationed in East Germany and forced to watch the Soviet empire dissolve around him.

Putin’s ambitions require him to ensure that the United States does not try to prevent him from rebuilding his empire. So he sought to help Trump, who created harmful political chaos in America and who oppose US involvement in NATO and Ukraine and which proved to be easily manipulated by the Russian dictator. At the same time, Putin also tried to intervene in elections in Western Europe, supporting right-wing extremists who also oppose European support for Ukraine.

Putin has been aided in his efforts by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States and Europe; Christian fundamentalists see Putin as their champion in a global culture war. They see Ukraine as allied with the liberal and secular European Union and therefore want Putin to win the war.

Trump is likely to side with Christian nationalists, who are a key part of his base, and side with Putin against Ukraine. It would represent the end result of Putin’s decades-long effort to install Trump in the White House.

To hide the truth about Trump’s ties to Putin and Russia, Trump, his lieutenants, pro-Trump pundits all have worked hard to convince voters that he is not in Putin’s pocket. A key part of that effort has been a long-running propaganda campaign designed to convince the public that the initial Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax. Trump then used this argument to try to discredit any other investigation into his actions from his own two indictments to his four criminal charges.

To muddy the waters, they focused on the so-called Steele dossier, a report by a former British intelligence officer that became public after the 2016 election. Trump pointed to flaws in the Steele dossier to argue that the entire Trump- Russia relied on false information. But that is not true; the Steele dossier it was not the basis of the FBI’s decision TO open the case and played no part in his main investigation; special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the investigation from the FBI in 2017, did not rely on the Steele dossier at all.

Trump’s efforts to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation have been aided by William Barr, his own attorney general, who preemptively made misleading statements about the findings of Mueller’s investigation before Mueller’s final report was made public and then named a pro-Trump special counsel to investigate the government’s own Trump-Russia investigation. That flagrantly politicized the effort failed spectacularly.

Now, no amount of disinformation can hide the truth about the Trump-Russia affair. The truth stares us in the face. It can be seen in the dead of Ukraine.