President Donald Trump arrives with Vice President Mike Pence, and Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, for a ceremony to establish the U.S. Space Command in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Aug. 29, 2019. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
On August 29, US President Donald Trump announced that he has canceled his scheduled visit to Poland, sending Vice President Mike Pence in his place.
“To ensure that all resources of the federal government are focused on the arriving storm, I have decided to send our Vice President Mike Pence to Poland this weekend in my place,” Trump said. “It’s something very important for me to be here. This storm looks like it could be a very, very big one indeed.”
According to an official version, the decision is linked to Hurricane Dorian’s landfall in Florida. The storm is expected to reach Florida as a Category 4 storm on Labor Day (September 2).
It was expected that Trump would be in Poland in from August 30 to September 2 and participate in events related to the 80th anniversary of the beginning of World War II (September 1, 1935) and meet with the Polish President. Trump’s Security Adviser John Bolton had said that Trump would meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Poland.
Hurricane Dorian is just a formal pretext. Trump just sent a strong signal that the Eastern Europe policy is beyond his key priorities. This is also a signal that the relations with Russia (including President Vladimir Putin) is more important for the Trump administration than demonstration of support to Poland, the Baltic States or Ukraine.
Indirectly, this is a signal to the ‘non-system’ Russian opposition that seeks to destabilize the Russian capital of Moscow using the elections to the local parliament that it will get no direct support. Despite this, it would be wrong to say that the Washington establishment has ceased its plans to influence Russian internal policies. According to Russian sources, over the past week, Russian-language pro-Western media organizations have started a large-scale advertising campaign using Google Ads and other. This costly campaign is designed to increase their reach among the Russian audience and actively exploits mainstream anri-Russian narratives.
