"We have to consider the possibility that President Trump is a Russian asset," former minister Graham Stuart said on X last week. Do we?

Why has this possibility been raised?
Because Donald Trump's policies have been unprecedentedly pro-Russian. Until this week, when the US pressed the Kremlin to commit to a ceasefire, the Trump administration had apparently asked for nothing from President Putin, while making a series of unilateral concessions on behalf of the Ukrainians: ruling out Nato membership for Ukraine, demanding that they make territorial concessions, voting in Russia's favour at the UN over the invasion, resuming diplomatic relations with Moscow. In his confrontation with President Zelenskyy last month, Trump took offence at what he called Zelenskyy's "tremendous hatred" for President Putin. As a result of all this, and bolstered by long-standing rumours, many – including Tory MP Graham Stuart, Democrat senator Jeff Merkley and retired US intelligence officers – have asked whether Trump is a Russian "asset".

What sort of rumours?
The most recent, in February, was spread by Alnur Mussayev, a former KGB officer from Kazakhstan. He said on Facebook that Trump was signed up in Moscow in 1987 under the codename "Krasnov". Trump visited Moscow that year, and he would have been under KGB surveillance. There have also been claims from Czech defectors that Czechoslovakian intelligence mounted an extensive spying operation on Trump, together with "friends" from the KGB, after he married a Czech model, Ivana Zelníková, in 1977. The evidence for the first claim looks flimsy: Mussayev was not employed by the KGB in 1987, and never worked for the section of the organisation that recruited foreign spies. And there is certainly no evidence that either operation recruited Trump.

What other rumours are there?
The best-known were compiled in a dossier by Christopher Steele, a former head of MI6's Russia desk, who did research into Trump for Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. Steele was sufficiently alarmed that he took his findings to US intelligence. He found that the Russian government was "working to get Mr Trump elected" in that year's presidential election, and that his associates had met Russian agents, possibly to conspire with them. The first two claims were later verified by the US special counsel Robert Mueller's report – but it did not prove a criminal conspiracy. Steele also recorded a series of "unverified and potentially unverifiable" claims. The most lurid was that the FSB (formerly the KGB) has footage of Trump engaging in depraved activities with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013, which it uses as kompromat: blackmail material. There is no proof of this. Trump does, though, have a long financial relationship with Russia.

What financial relationship?
Trump tried to expand his property empire into Russia, with little success. But Russian money saved his floundering businesses in the 1990s, when bankruptcies had made him toxic to US lenders. A Russian-American mobster named Felix Sater poured cash into Trump's businesses. "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this," Sater wrote in a 2015 email. For years, the only bank that would lend to Trump's property empire was Deutsche Bank, which was later fined record sums for laundering Russian money. It's likely the Russian authorities were aware of all this. But, as his defenders point out, Russian investors weren't unusual in the New York property world at that time. One former partner said: "The only people who were willing to [invest] were tasteless Russians, people who like the absurd, ostentatious gold-leaf lifestyle he has."

Why is Trump so pro-Putin?
On a personal level, he likes Putin and he dislikes Zelenskyy. "Putin went through a hell of a lot with me," Trump said during the Oval Office confrontation. This was a reference to Mueller's report into Russian interference in the 2016 election (such as the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails) – a probe Trump always portrays as a "witch hunt" by his political opponents. When Trump met Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Putin denied Russian involvement. Trump broke with US intelligence's conclusion that the Russians had interfered in the election by accepting this at face value; he has long held the unfounded belief that it was Ukraine doing the interference. Another sore point is his first impeachment in 2019, which was triggered by the revelation that he had withheld arms from Ukraine in an effort to pressure Zelenskyy into investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter's business dealings in the country. (Zelenskyy resisted.) Because of this, Trump sees Ukraine, broadly, as a corrupt nation in league with his political enemies.

What other reasons does he have for supporting Putin?
Maga is premised on America First isolationism, which often tips over into support for Russia. Trump despises Biden and his policies, including support for Ukraine. But beyond that, Trump and Putin have much in common politically: both dislike the liberal international order because it limits their power; both, for different reasons, dislike Nato. Trump openly admires strongmen such as Putin; he has shown a Putin-style desire to "manage" elections. Finally, he is famously transactional, and feels that Russia has a great deal more to offer him and America than Ukraine.

So what really is going on?
There's no evidence Trump is a Russian asset; but he clearly has a certain regard for Putin and Russia. He was echoing Russian propaganda long before he called Zelenskyy a dictator or claimed he started the war. In 2018, Trump defended Russia's takeover of Crimea. In 2022, he called the invasion of Ukraine "genius". "I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV," said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. His loyalties will be tested in the coming weeks.

Maga Putinism
Among Maga Republicans, scepticism towards the Ukrainian cause is rooted in America First isolationism and resentment of the costs. As Vice-President J.D. Vance put it in 2022: "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another." It is also partly a foreign policy "realist" position: the war is seen as unwinnable and risks a global conflagration; Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth argued in Brussels last month that Europe should pay for its own defence, while the US pivots to deterring China. But in Trumpworld, scepticism towards Ukraine is often tinged with hostility – and admiration for Putin. Many on the Maga Right are impressed by Putin's proclaimed support for Christian civilisation against "woke" values. Steve Bannon, Trump's influential former strategist, sees Russia as a partner in a Judeo-Christian campaign against "godless" China. And the issue has become entangled in the vicious US culture wars. Zelenskyy is seen as the Democrats' friend, and the Maga Right – from Elon Musk to the broadcaster Tucker Carlson – has adopted Kremlin perspectives: that Ukraine is uniquely corrupt; that it is to blame for the war; that Zelenskyy is not a legitimate democratic leader.

"Few public figures have exploded on to the world stage quite like US Vice-President J.D. Vance," said Dominic Sandbrook in The Times. In his first major foreign speech, at the Munich Security Conference, he caused a stink by berating European leaders about free speech. After that, he laid into Ukraine's President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for supposedly showing insufficient gratitude to President Trump. And he then upset more people by dismissing talk of UK and French peacekeepers in Ukraine, saying a US mineral deal would protect the nation better than "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years". One assumes copies of Vance's misery memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy", aren't "flying off the shelves in Royal Wootton Bassett". Vance has swiftly established himself as a hate figure among critics of the Trump administration, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. The internet is so awash with parodies that he is now "more meme than man".

This mockery by progressives won't bother Vance, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. He's used to being "the outlier in the room – whether as a conservative in liberal spaces" such as Yale Law School, or as a self-styled hillbilly "in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley". The vice-presidency has traditionally been the "booby prize" of US politics, but Vance has proved effective and versatile in the role so far. He has "played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage"; he also spends a lot of time on X/Twitter deftly skewering Trump's opponents. If the administration completes its term in decent shape, he'll be well-positioned to replace Trump in the White House.

I suspect Vance and his boss will fall out before then, said Alison Phillips in The i Paper. That partly comes from reading Vance's memoir, in which he angrily relates how, in his youth, he tried to ingratiate himself with his mother's successive boyfriends in a vain attempt to stop them leaving. He got his ear pierced to impress Steve, "a midlife-crisis sufferer", pretended to love police cars to please Chip, an alcoholic police officer, and was kind to the children of Ken, an odd-job man. Reading this, one can't help but see Trump as just another "father figure" who is destined to let Vance down. The president is "the ultimate transactional politician" – for him, it's all about deals. Vance, at heart, is an "ideologue", with little interest in deals. Sooner or later, that difference in outlook will lead to a rupture.

Giorgio Locatelli opened Locanda Locatelli, his Italian restaurant in Marylebone, back in 2002, says Hannah Evans in The Sunday Times. Within a year, it had been awarded a Michelin star and had become a magnet for A-listers: Madonna and Guy Ritchie were regulars; Tony Blair and Bill Clinton visited.

But in December, Locatelli, 61, abruptly closed its doors, giving no explanation. It wasn't because the restaurant was struggling, he now says. On the contrary, it was doing well. "It just got a bit boring." He was finding it exhausting; and with its glitzy clientele and high prices, it wasn't the kind of place he wanted to be running any more. "When we started, the last thing we were thinking of doing was anything elitist. But naturally, because of the rent you pay, the design, it became elitist. Yes, the food was what I do, but the atmosphere wasn't representative of what we like."

He's now working on a new venture, Locatelli, an 80-seat restaurant at the National Gallery that will have a shorter, cheaper menu. "I want it to be like a town square: boom, zoom, people coming, going," he says. "One of the most essential characteristics of Italian food is that it's classless. You know that the president and the Pope are 100% going to have as nice a meal as some farmer. That's what we drifted from at Locanda. It became such an uptight place. Locatelli will be for everybody."