When Putin blamed the 2020 US election result on mail-in voting he bolstered a Trump obsession – just one example of the blurring of international goals and domestic grievances

It was a language he could understand. Donald Trump had lost the 2020 US presidential election, Russia’s Vladimir Putin told him last Friday, because it was rigged through mail-in voting.

Three days later, the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to eliminate mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly a third of Americans that has not been credibly linked to election fraud.