Putin should be alarmed that Trump's Helsinki behaviour has propelled him closer towards impeachment.

If Putin and his kleptocratic 'siloviki' cohorts in the Kremlin popped champagne corks when Trump won the 2016 US Presidential election, after the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki they were more than effusive in praising the way that Putin exposed to the world just how much 'control' he has over Trump.

In the words of that dyed-in-the-wool Soviet foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov,

"...Lavrov, asked how the summit went, responded: "Fabulous…better than super.".

Unfortunately for Donald Trump no such accolades as "fabulous" or "better than super" greeted him when he stepped back onto US soil after his Helsinki meeting with Putin.

Rather, he was met with a chorus of criticism of just how he not only threw all his intelligence agencies under the bus, with Putin smirking next to him, but also that throughout their joint press conference one could not really distinguish between their answers to the questions that were posed by the press.

Furthermore, what is now taxing the minds of many policy-makers in the US is ,"Just what did Trump and Putin discuss during their more than two and a half hours of private conversation?"

Only the respective translators were present during their discussion, and it is NOT known whether they were present THROUGHOUT the duration of this private meeting.

I can only point to, once again, what Putin said when confronted with a question about Ukraine's Crimea.

As reported by The New York Times,

"Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and continues to support Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine, aggression that the West has condemned. Mr. Trump did not address the matter publicly, either before or after the meetings on Monday, but Mr. Putin was asked whether his American counterpart had made any concessions.

“The posture of President Trump on Crimea is well known and he stands firmly by it,” Mr. Putin said. “He continues to maintain that it was illegal to annex it. Our viewpoint is different.” (New York Times :July 16, 2018) (my emphasis)

Trump's posture on Ukraine's Crimea is:

• President Donald Trump told G7 leaders that Crimea is Russian because everyone who lives there speaks Russian, according to two diplomatic sources. ( Alberto Nardelli and Julia Ioffe)
• U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking two weeks before a planned summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has declined to rule out recognizing Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.
  
  Asked by reporters on Air Force One late on June 29 whether reports about him dropping Washington's longstanding opposition to the annexation were true, Trump said: "We're going to have to see." (RFE/RL)

This being the case, exactly how is Trump maintaining that Putin illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimea, when he believes that Ukraine's Crimea is Russian?

Is it Trump or the US Congress and Senate that believes that Putin illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimea?

The deafening silence of Trump to denounce Putin's war with Ukraine, and his illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimea, prompted a US bi-partisan statement of condemnation.

As reported by Myroslava Gongadze, 
 
"In a Tuesday evening statement signed by the co-chairs of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, Democratic Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Sandy Levin of Michigan (left), and Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, said they were "deeply troubled by the president's subservient behavior towards President Putin."
....
The legislators also expressed concern that Trump didn't condemn Russia's "assault on Ukraine's sovereignty, including cyberattacks on its institutions, aggression in the Donbass [sic] region, and the illegal occupation of Crimea, the first forcible transnational seizure of territory in Europe since World War II." (VOA : July 19, 2018 ) (my emphasis)
 
And on the sanctions front, we now discover that,

"The U.S. Treasury is open to removing Russian aluminum producer Rusal from a U.S. sanctions list, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Friday, adding the objective was “not to put Rusal out of business.” (David Lawder : Reuters : July 21, 2018) (my emphasis)

Does this sudden about-turn on US sanctions give us a hint of what Putin and Trump privately discussed at Helsinki?

Lavrov, together with Putin's kleptocratic "siloviki" in the Kremlin, may still be cock-a-hoop at just how Putin controlled Trump at Helsinki.

But the fallout from that  private Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki is far from abating in the US.

Putin should now be alarmed that Trump's Helsinki behaviour has propelled him closer towards impeachment.

(to be continued)