We can be shocked, but hardly surprised. That Donald Trump ignored the explicit advice of his aides – including a cue-card that featured the all-caps instruction “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” – when he called Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and congratulated him on his re-election is utterly consistent with everything we know about the US president.

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For one thing, we learned a while ago that he blithely dismisses the guidance of his most senior national security counsellors, especially when Russia is involved. Recall the episode last spring when Trump headed to Brussels to deliver a speech to leaders of Nato. His defence secretary, secretary of state and national security adviser had written and cleared a line in which Trump would re-commit the US to Nato’s all-for-one-and-one-for-all promise of mutual defence, the Article 5 pledge seen by Nato’s Baltic members especially as a vital deterrent against potential Russian aggression. The text was duly briefed to reporters. But when Trump got on his feet, he simply didn’t say the words.

Note, too, how strenuously he avoids saying anything that might discomfit Putin. Trump’s spokespeople might issue the odd trenchant statement about Russia, but the words he says or tweets himself are almost always calculated to please rather than trouble Moscow. (One observer has noted how Trump is usually merciless about mocking the height of smaller men, from Little Rocket Man to Little Marco (Rubio), while the diminutive stature of the Russian president is never, ever mentioned.)

Besides, if Trump’s advisers wrote the words “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” because of the undemocratic nature of Putin’s landslide win on Sunday – in a contest where the Russian leader had near-total control of the media and from which his most popular potential rival, Alexei Navalny, was barred – then they were hopelessly naive. Trump always congratulates strongmen on becoming stronger, no matter if they choke democracy in the process. He did it when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tightened his grip in Turkey and did it again when Xi Jinping made the same move in China. When Xi made himself president for life, Trump did not express concern but joked – twice – that “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

So we can hardly have expected anything else from Donald Trump. But that is not the case with the other man to offer warm plaudits to Putin, a man duty bound to do much better: Jean-Claude Juncker.

“I wish to convey my congratulations on your re-election as president of the Russian Federation,” Mr Juncker wrote on European commission notepaper, thereby speaking for the 28 member states of the EU. “I wish you every success in carrying out your high responsibilities.”

Now, Juncker is known to be more sympathetic to Moscow than most in the Brussels hierarchy, and he’s been criticised before for undermining EU sanctions imposed on Russia following the annexation of Crimea. In that context, it’s perhaps not surprising that his letter made no mention, for example, of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury: he might be among those waiting for definitive, courtroom-level proof of Russian state guilt – even though, if the Litvinenko case is any guide, such proof can take years to establish.

But on the plain matter of democracy, he was surely on simpler ground. Putin won 75% of a vote that was barely contested and where there were credible allegations of ballot-stuffing. To which the right response of the EU should be not congratulation but condemnation.

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Upholding democracy is meant to be part of the European Union’s core mission. After 1989, the EU helped post-communist, would-be member states transition to democracy, demanding they adopt basic democratic norms such as a free press, an independent judiciary and free and fair elections. Through his herogram to the Kremlin, Juncker has undermined that work – sending a signal to would-be authoritarian governments in Hungary or Poland that if they erode democracy and follow Putin’s lead, they might receive as much praise as protest.

Thankfully, other EU officials acted differently. EU council president Donald Tusk refused to send such a letter, while Guy Verhofstadt, the EU parliament’s negotiator on Brexit, tweeted: “This is no time for congratulations.” They recognise what Juncker does not: that if the European Union does not stand for democracy against tyranny, then it stands for nothing.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist