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Article snippet: MOSCOW — President Trump’s acknowledgment that he shared intelligence on terrorism with Russia was something of a coup for President Vladimir V. Putin, whose mantra about forging a global alliance to fight violent extremists never gained much traction in the West. Mr. Putin’s repeated calls for unity in fighting terrorism — delivered from the podium of the United Nations, at countless global summit meetings and after every grisly attack around the world — have often been met with skepticism, interpreted as smoke screens to cloak the violence fomented by the Kremlin in places like Chechnya, Ukraine and Syria. Then on Tuesday, an American president seemed to take up that call, at least momentarily, with Mr. Trump writing on Twitter that sharing sensitive intelligence information with ISIS & terrorism,” he wrote. That could signal a major policy shift, political analysts said. “The Kremlin has been so skillful in getting the president of the United States to cooperate in an unusual way,” said Maxim Trudolyubov, a Russian political analyst and columnist. “It is a big and completely unexpected coup for the Kremlin.” Mr. Putin has long sought such cooperation. In part, he owes his 17 years leading Russia as either president or prime minister to the fact that he defeated a domestic insurgency in Chechnya and the Northern Caucasus by branding it as part of the global war on terrorism and flattening the place. Although Al Qaeda was almost certainly active in Chechnya,... Link to the full article to read more