For Putin, Trump’s win is new opening, and chance to win war

Berlin: The Kremlin tried and failed for four years to turn President Donald Trump’s friendly rhetoric into friendly policy.

Now it has a second chance.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s US election, Russian officials said they cared little about the outcome. US policy toward Russia had only hardened during Trump’s four years in office, they argued, citing sanctions and his delivery of weapons to Ukraine.

But after Trump’s victory, the mood began to shift. Some people close to the Kremlin sought to pave the way for rapprochement with Washington despite what many Russians see as an American proxy war against them in Ukraine.

“Trump and his team have a reputation of being very pragmatic,” Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. Trump’s return to the White House would be an opportunity, he added, to “look at things in a more problem-solving manner than was done by previous administrations.”

Dmitriev declined to comment on whether he had sent private messages this week to anyone on the Trump team. But he issued a public statement signaling that the Kremlin saw a second Trump presidency as a welcome change, and a new opening to form a bond with Trump — who has often praised Putin’s authoritarian leadership and avoided condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

After the “lies, incompetence and malice of the Biden administration,” Dmitriev said, there were now “new opportunities for resetting relations between Russia and the United States.”

It was a notable invitation from Dmitriev, whose role as an informal emissary for Putin was documented in the US special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. At the time, Robert Mueller found, Dmitriev was already seeking to connect with Trump’s inner circle the morning after his win over Hillary Clinton.

The Kremlin’s top priority this time around appears to be cutting a deal on its terms in Ukraine. Trump has said repeatedly that he could end the war in a day, without saying how, and a settlement outlined by Vice President-elect JD Vance echoes what people close to the Kremlin say Putin wants: allowing Russia to keep the territory it has captured and guaranteeing that Ukraine will not join NATO.

Vladimir Pozner, a longtime Russian and Soviet state television journalist, said in an interview from Moscow that none of his friends and acquaintances had wanted Vice President Kamala Harris to win. Trump, he said, was seen as someone who could end the war, “probably in Russia’s favor.”

“There is this general feeling that Trump would be better for Russia,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be finished with this war, and maybe the relationship will improve.”

Publicly, the Kremlin strove to strike a muted tone Wednesday, a contrast to the celebrations of Trump’s 2016 victory — when there were Champagne corks popping in parliament — that proved premature. While Trump spoke favorably of Putin throughout his presidency, U.S. sanctions against Russia increased and his administration was the first to send antitank weapons to Ukraine.

“If someone can change something, then this should be welcomed,” Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, said, referring to Trump’s promise to stop the war. “If these are words during the election campaign — we have seen this before.” The Kremlin, noticeably, did not offer congratulations to Trump, though that may still be in the offing.

Ukraine, of course, would have to agree to any deal that Trump might try to cut with Putin, although the United States has leverage as Ukraine’s most important provider of arms. For now, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has vowed to keep fighting and says that he will not cede territory; on Wednesday, he became one of the first world leaders to congratulate Trump by telephone on a “historic” win.

But in Moscow, some are already gaming out scenarios for how Trump could bring the war to a favorable end. Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor close to the Kremlin, said the first step would be pushing Ukrainian troops out of Russia’s Kursk region, where they hold a sliver of territory.

After that, he said, Putin will be ready for talks, conditioned on Russia’s being able to keep the territory it has captured. Trump might send Cabinet designees to make his position clear, even before the inauguration, Remchukov added. (Any negotiations involving Trump officials before he takes office could be illegal under the 1799 Logan Act.)

“They might say, ‘Let’s have a cease-fire for Christmas,’” Remchukov said. “And he’s not even president yet, but he’s already racking up the points, because there’s peace everywhere, since he’s the president of peace. That’s how I think it will be.”

During President Joe Biden’s term, the Kremlin still built or kept bridges with people in Trump’s orbit. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who is part of Trump’s inner circle, flew to Moscow in February to interview Putin, becoming the first American media personality to sit down with the Russian leader since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Observers in Moscow point to the connections between Trump and Putin, who both espouse conservative, “traditional” values and nurture images as tough, decisive leaders.

“Putin and Trump understand each other to a much greater degree than, say, Putin and Biden,” Pozner said. “That’s very much a feeling that a lot of people here have.”

Russian institutions have decriminalized domestic violence, banned the “global LGBTQ movement” as extremist and sought to curb abortions — actions that echo policies pursued by Republicans in the United States.

Critics also point to what they call Trump’s shameful deference to Putin at a 2018 summit in Helsinki, when he accepted Putin’s word that he had not interfered in the 2016 election over the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Yet even some of Putin’s fiercest opponents said they saw reasons for hope in Trump’s victory. Ilya Yashin, a prominent anti-Kremlin politician freed in a prisoner exchange with the West in August, said in an interview that “Trump’s first presidency was not so easy for Putin.” Surrendering Ukraine, he said, “would look like an extremely weak decision, and I think Trump understands this very well.”

He added that Trump’s victory could drive home to Russians that America is a real democracy, not the oligarchy controlled by a liberal “deep state” depicted on their television sets.

“We should be absolutely calm,” Yashin said. “This is how democracy works.”