-- “Every president in recent history except [Trump] has understood (as Putin surely does) that America has a strategic as well as a moral interest in standing with democrats around the world, and that America grows stronger and more powerful the more successfully it represents universal values on the world stage,” Foreign Policy’s Daniel B. Baer wrote following last weekend’s massive protests across Russia. “The silence of Trump and his team (last weekend) was exactly what Putin wanted — his investment in Trump’s election paying dividends in the form of what (former Hillary Clinton adviser) Jake Sullivan … called Trump’s ‘unilateral moral disarmament.’”

-- Critics believe Trump’s lack of moral leadership has allowed Russia to more forcefully assert itself in the Middle East:

• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani plans to meet with Putin in Moscow later this month, and both countries are expected to sign a slew of documents on economic and political issues.
• In Libya, there are new accusations that Russia is sending operatives to bolster an armed faction.
• In Afghanistan, U.S. generals have also said Moscow may be supplying weapons to the Taliban.

-- Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen said Putin feels emboldened by Trump’s lack of moral leadership. “It took the [past] administration many years to understand the severity of the situation [and] it’s gone from bad to worse,” Gessen said in a phone interview last week.

-- The Post’s Moscow bureau chief David Filipov sees a “power vacuum” created by a silent Trump administration. Though we can't know for sure what Putin expected of Trump, “they’re loving the fact that there’s no leadership” from Washington so far. “They’ll definitely move … to fill in that vacuum,” Filipov said.

• Former Russian MP and Putin critic Denis Voronenkov was shot dead in a crowded Kiev square less than 72 hours after telling a Washington Post reporter he was in danger last month, making him the eighth high-profile Russian who has died since Trump’s November presidential victory. 

-- Almost every day brings a fresh illustration of the degree to which Trump is unconcerned with promoting democracy or holding America’s moral high ground. From last week alone:

• The president did not speak out after Putin’s forces cracked down on mass protests across Russia last week.
• The U.S. government backed off its policy of regime change in Syria, saying that the Syrian people will decide President Bashar al-Assad's future. (As if that’s something they could do.) “Do we think he's a hindrance? Yes. Are we going to sit there and focus on getting him out? No," said U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.
• Trump's State Department told Congress it plans to approve a multibillion-dollar sale of F-16 fighter jets to Bahrain without the human rights conditions imposed under Barack Obama.

-- Trump today will welcome Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, his favorite Middle East stongman, to the White House. Trying to reboot the bilateral relationship, he will steer clear of discussing human rights issues in the country. Aides said they will instead focus on economic and national security concerns.

“The Obama administration did not allow Sissi to set foot in Washington after he staged a bloody coup against a democratically elected government in 2013,” deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl writes. “His regime is holding, according to Egyptian and U.S. monitors, between 40,000 and 60,000 political prisoners, including thousands of secular liberal democrats. His security forces were responsible for 1,400 extrajudicial killings in 2016 alone, and 912 disappearances between August 2015 and August 2016, according to Moataz El Fegiery of Front Line Defenders. Eighty-five civil society activists have been banned from leaving the country and dozens of journalists are being held without trial, according to Bahey el-din Hassan of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. None of it matters to Trump, who has called Sissi ‘a fantastic guy’ because of his supposed support for the war against the Islamic State — never mind that Egypt has been losing the battle against the jihadists in its own Sinai Peninsula.”

“Sissi’s brutal repression has made Egypt a mass-production facility for violent extremism,” add Robert Kagan from Brookings and Michele Dunne from the Carnegie Endowment in an op-ed for today's paper.