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Photo by Andrew Harnik / AP

In subsequent years, nobody paid much attention as Russia, which many had hoped would become a Western-oriented, liberalizing state, turned into something quite different. Or perhaps I should put it more strongly: nobody in Western politics paid much attention, but many others in the West were eager to aid that transformation. In particular, many were eager to help a cabal of revanchist former KGB officers, in league with Russian organized crime, steal money that belonged to the Russian state, launder it abroad, bring it back and use it to take power. While Western presidents and prime ministers were distracted by other things, Western lawyers, accountants, unscrupulous offshore bankers and even mainstream bankers were happily taking cuts.

Everybody wanted a piece of the action. In 2006, Rosneft, a Russian company blatantly built on stolen assets, debuted with great fanfare on the London stock exchange. The prospectus warned that “crime and corruption could create a difficult business climate in Russia,” but it was convenient, and very lucrative, to pretend that Russia had a “normal” business environment (with that small exception) nevertheless. The same week the stock debuted, President Vladimir Putin hosted a G8 meeting in St. Petersburg.

Here I am offering a truncated version of this long and complicated story. But it’s worth recalling the basic elements because they help explain where we are today. Think about this: we still don’t know exactly how much Russian money was invested in Trump’s real estate empire. But we do know that Russian money flooded into New York real estate (and London real estate) over the past 15 years, where it pumped up prices, distorted housing markets, contributed to rising inequality and helped enrich Trump, among others. We know that Trump, among others, did deals with many people who had Russian or ex-Soviet connections. We also know that Trump has admired Putin for many years, perhaps because Putin used money to win political power and then used political power to make money, which is exactly what Trump clearly aspired, successfully, to do too.