'What do you think?' Trump asked Putin if he should arm Ukraine: former officials

According to a report from the New York Times, Donald Trump's hostility toward Ukraine originated during a meeting in 2017 with Russian President Vladimir Putin where the recently elected former president asked the Russian strongman for advice.

The report notes that Trump's meeting with Putin in Hamburg led to former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson hustling out of the meeting and telling "nervous" aides, "We’ve got work to do to change the president’s mind on Ukraine."

According to insiders, Tillerson had just witnessed Putin "put on a master class in seeking to shape the thinking of the new American president" who was a novice when it came to international relations.

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At one pivotal moment, Trump asked Putin for advice ("What do you think?") on whether he should help arm Ukraine only to have the Russian leader tell him it would be " a mistake" before adding that Ukraine would come asking again if he complied.

According the the Times' Mark Mazzetti and Adam Entous, "The Russian leader disparaged Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with aspirations of joining the European Union and NATO. Ukraine, he told Mr. Trump, was a corrupt, fabricated country. Russia, which had seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine three years earlier and backed pro-Russia separatists in a border region, had every right to exert its influence over the country, he insisted."

The reporting notes that Trump went into the meeting with "hawkish" notes prepared by his staff that went by the wayside as Putin made his case to the novice Trump.

"The meeting in Hamburg fit into a yearlong pattern in which an escalating political grudge against Ukraine on Mr. Trump’s part became an opening for Mr. Putin to pursue his own aim of tempering American support for Kyiv, according to interviews with American and European officials and allies of Mr. Trump, as well as accounts in memoirs," the Times is reporting.

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