In a little-noticed maneuver in the 2016 Presidential campaign, the Trump team watered down the Republican Party’s platform on military aid to Ukraine. Trump’s campaign director, Paul Manafort, had previously earned millions of dollars as a political consultant to the pro-Russian president of Ukraine and as an advisor to one of Putin’s oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska.

Let it be noted too that the Obama administration sat on its hands when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and seized control of a large chunk of Ukraine.

NPR reported in 2016:

One of the questions raised over the course of this year’s presidential race is about how a President Trump would deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

One reason to wonder: the Republican Party platform’s new language on policy towards Ukraine.

When Republican Party leaders drafted the platform prior to their convention in Cleveland last month, they had relatively little input from the campaign of then-presumptive nominee Donald Trump on most issues — except when it came to a future Republican administration’s stance on Ukraine.

It started when platform committee member Diana Denman tried to insert language calling for the U.S. to provide lethal defensive weapons to the Ukrainian government, which is fighting a separatist insurrection backed by Russia. Denman says she had no idea she was “going into a fire fight,” calling it “an interesting exchange, to say the least.”

Denman is a long time GOP activist from Texas. When she presented her proposal during a platform subcommittee meeting last month, “two gentleman,” whom Denman said were part of the Trump campaign, came over, looked at the language, and asked that it be set aside for further review.

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She says after further discussion the pair “had to make some calls and clear it.” She says they found the language was still too strong.

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The Trump campaign convinced the platform committee to change Denman’s proposal. It went from calling on the U.S. to provide Ukraine “lethal defensive weapons” to the more benign phrase “appropriate assistance.”

It’s more than semantics. Many Republicans have been demanding the Obama administration provide a more robust response to Russia’s incursions in Ukraine.

Denman “was steam rolled,” said Melinda Haring of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC, think tank, who believes the language the Trump campaign approved is weaker. And she says “it’s anyone’s guess” what Trump would do regarding Ukraine and Russia, and that perhaps he might not even back “appropriate assistance.”

Haring was referring to Trumps appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos last month, when Trump said Vladimir Putin is “not going to go into Ukraine, OK? Just so you understand, he’s not going to go into Ukraine.”