Is Trump tougher than Obama on Russia? It’s complicated.

President Donald Trump rage-tweeted his way through the holiday weekend, and lashed out at his detractors by returning to a claim that he’s leaned on before: He's tougher on Russia than his predecessor, Barack Obama. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubled down on Trump's tweet during Tuesday’s press briefing, saying that Obama had been “too weak.”

But as is often the case with Trump's Twitter rants, the truth is a bit more complicated.

For starters, Trump may not have a problem attacking Obama, but he hasn't shown the same ferocity toward Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin. He has dragged his feet on imposing new sanctions passed by an overwhelming congressional majority and has earnestly described Putin’s denials as believable.

"Every time he sees me, he says, 'I didn't do that,'" Trump said of Putin in November, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. "And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it."

At the same time, Trump has been more aggressive on the military front in Ukraine than his predecessor, recently arming the country with weapons in its war with Russia-backed separatists.

Here’s what you need to know:

The intelligence community is unanimous in its conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and plans to do so again in the 2018 midterm elections. But Trump has not done much about it and has repeatedly, cast doubt on the intelligence community’s findings.

When the Obama administration imposed sanctions in retaliation for the election meddling in December of 2016, Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn called the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to ask him not to escalate the situation and the Russians agreed. Flynn later lied to the FBI about this interaction and has plead guilty to doing so in Mueller’s probe.

Read: Trump just gave Putin a big pass on sanctions

Months later in the summer of 2017, Trump’s flirtation with Putin was so blatant that the Republican-led Congress took the reins on future sanctions, overwhelmingly agreeing to pass a fresh round of sanctions against Russia in response to the election meddling. Further, Congress stripped Trump of his power to roll back Obama-era sanctions without congressional approval. Trump begrudgingly signed that veto-proof bill into law, describing parts of it as "unconstitutional." But he has yet to actually implement new sanctions related to Russia's election-meddling.

Trump again fueled Russia-related anxiety in January, when the Treasury Department's long-awaited “Kremlin Report,” designed to to map Kremlin-aligned oligarchs and their “indices of corruption,” ended up being a sloppy simulation of Forbes Magazine’s richest Russians list.

A similar anxiety is building when it comes to the 2018 mid-term elections. There are several proposals in Congress focused on updating America’s election security to cope with the threat from Russia, but the administration has not taken any initiative to push them through. The first set of primary elections begins in March and it remains to be seen if the country is better prepared than it was in 2016.

“I can’t say that I’ve been specifically directed [by President Trump],” to prevent Russia’s influence in the 2018 elections, Admiral Mike Rogers — the head of the National Security Agency — recently testified to Congress.

Trump may shy away from publicly criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, but on the military front he’s adopted an aggressive posture. In December of 2017, Trump personally signed off on a $41.5 million arms sale including Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine as the country continues to fight Russian separatists in the East. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov responded angrily, saying the move made the United States an “accomplice in fueling the war.”

Congress passed a law in 2014 allowing such sales, but the Obama administration never approved any large government or private deals with Ukraine out of concern that it would escalate the conflict and give Putin an excuse to increase his military presence along Europe's border. “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” Obama told The Atlantic in an April 2016 cover story.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been adamant that Russian interference in Ukraine will not be ignored. “It stands as the single most difficult obstacle to us re-normalizing the relationship with Russia, which we badly would like to do,” he said in early December. And under Trump, the Treasury Department has expanded sanctions related to Russia's annexation of Crimea, recently targeting 38 Russian entities and individuals.

The Trump administration has also continued or ramped up Obama’s efforts to deter Russian aggression in Europe. In February, the Trump administration requested an extra $1.7 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative (EDI) that the Obama administration first created in 2014 to soothe European allies worried about Russia. That would bring the budget to $6.5 billion, almost doubling Obama’s proposed budget.

In a speech in December outlining his administration’s new national security strategy, Trump also took a belligerent tone toward Russia and China, describing the two nuclear powers as threatening rivals challenging “American power, influence and interests.” Trump went on to say that “they are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

Experts across the political spectrum do not believe that the United States has done enough to deter Russia from interfering in another election in the U.S. or elsewhere, for that matter. Obama’s Defense Secretary Ash Carter told Politico this week that the government’s efforts have “absolutely not” been sufficient. “It hasn’t changed the behavior of Vladimir Putin, and that means neither the Obama administration nor the Trump administration has done enough.”

That doesn’t bode well for the mid-term elections, because Russians are already back at it, according to the American intelligence community. Testifying in front of the Senate in February, CIA Director Mike Pompeo laid out the threat in simple terms: “We have seen Russian activity and intentions to impact the 2018 election cycle.”

Cover image: U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk during a break in a session of the APEC summit in Danang, Vietnam November 11, 2017. (Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS )