NATO–Russia relations

‘We have won’: Russians envision new global system with Trump victory

Author: Francesca Ebel and Catherine Belton Source: The Washington Post

November 7, 2024 at 08:43

Traditional Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls depicting Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are displayed at a gift shop in Moscow on Wednesday. (Yuri Kochetkov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Russians see Donald Trump’s win as a victory for conservative, isolationist forces in the world against a liberal, Western-dominated global order.

MOSCOW — President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning political comeback has created an opening for Russia to shatter Western unity on Ukraine and redraw the global power map, according to several influential members of the Russian elite.

Across the corridors of power in Moscow, the win for Trump’s populist campaign arguing that America should focus on its domestic woes over aiding countries like Ukraine was being hailed as a potential victory for Russia’s efforts to carve out its own sphere of influence in the world.

In even broader terms, it was seen as a victory for conservative, isolationist forces supported by Russia against a liberal, Western-dominated global order that sets the rules for the entire world and that the Kremlin (and its allies) have been seeking to undermine.

“We have won,” said Alexander Dugin, the Russian ideologue who has long pushed an imperialist agenda for Russia and supported disinformation efforts against Kamala Harris’s campaign. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat,” he wrote on X.

The deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, said on his Telegram channel: “The victory of the right in the so-called ‘free world’ will be a blow to the left-liberal forces that dominate it. It is not by chance that Europe was so openly ‘rooting’ for Harris, who would, in fact, preserve the rule of the Obama-Clinton ‘clan.’”

Konstantin Malofeyev, the Russian Orthodox billionaire who has funded a conservative agenda promoting traditional Christian values on the far-right and far-left across the West, crowed on Telegram that it would be possible to negotiate with Trump, “both about the division of Europe and the division of the world. After our victory on the battlefield.”

In more immediate terms, Trump’s election victory was expected to have a dramatic impact on Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, according to Leonid Slutsky, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

“Judging by the pre-election rhetoric … the Republican team is not going to send more and more American taxpayer money into the furnace of the proxy war against Russia,” he said. “Once the West stops propping up [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s neo-Nazi regime, its downfall will happen in a matter of months, if not days.”

A Ukrainian woman passes a souvenir stall with a flag depicting Ukrainian and U.S. flags, in downtown Kyiv on Wednesday. (Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

But others were more circumspect, and some warned that Trump’s presidency could lead to a more unpredictable era. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would wait to see if the president-elect’s campaign rhetoric criticizing support for Ukraine and calling for an end to the war translated into “concrete actions.” He declared that the United States remains “an unfriendly country that directly and indirectly is involved in a war against our state.”

Russian lawmaker Maria Butina, who previously served 15 months in a U.S. federal prison after being convicted of operating as an unregistered foreign agent in the United States, told The Post this was “a good chance for U.S.-Russian relations to improve.” She added, “Hopefully this time … Trump will keep his promise to truly be a peacemaker.”

Russian agent Maria Butina, center, holds flowers upon her arrival from the United States at Moscow International Airport Sheremetyevo, Oct. 26, 2019. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

In the weeks leading up to the election, Russian officials sought to downplay their interest in the vote, but that public stance was belied by what U.S. officials said were intensifying Kremlin-directed disinformation operations seeking to stoke chaos and target Harris. The operations built on earlier efforts to stoke isolationist sentiments, according to documents previously reported on by The Post.

In the end, Russian efforts to interfere in the 2024 election were “pretty marginal to the overall trend of voter sentiment,” said Eric Ciaramella, a former White House official now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, especially compared to 2016 when U.S. intelligence officials concluded that a Russian hack and leak operation had helped change the narrative in support of Trump.

But analysts also noted that more than a decade of Russian propaganda operations amplifying antiestablishment isolationist voices through increasingly sophisticated social media operations, including on X, had changed the mainstream political debate in a way that would never have been possible via traditional media.

“On a digital platform, your ability to do these things works,” said Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. Following the vote, X owner Elon Musk hailed the result as cementing the power of his platform to provide alternative views over “legacy media.”

Russia’s business community could also not hide a new sense of optimism that Trump’s victory would change things for the better in the Russian view.

Shares on the Moscow stock exchange surged nearly 3 percent in early trading as the election results came in, amid widespread expectations that Trump could propose lifting sanctions against Russia in return for an end to its military action.

“Trump is someone who is used to doing deals,” said one Moscow businessman, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “The expectation is that under Trump, decisions will be reached faster to end the conflict and ease sanctions.”

“For big business, Trump’s election is a hopeful factor,” he added. “Sanctions are strangling the economy, and costs are soaring.”

But share prices later settled, and some analysts said risks remain high that relations could run aground and that the standoff could worsen under a Trump presidency. Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected longtime editor of the Echo of Moscow radio station, said the potential for both houses of Congress to come under a Republican majority would break the long-held deadlock in the U.S. political system, making the government capable of reaching decisions at far greater speed and creating new risks.

The Republican majority “is the threat from the Kremlin’s point of view, because there are no internal contradictions, no internal chaos,” said Venediktov. “It was important for the Kremlin that the winning candidate was Mr. or Mrs. Chaos.”

A clear sign of the lack of Kremlin trust in Trump, Venediktov said, was Putin’s decision not to immediately congratulate Trump like other leaders had. “This is actually an insult,” he said. “It’s a signal.”

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019. (Susan Walsh/AP)

But others said Putin’s reticence was in fact a sign of the Kremlin’s growing confidence. Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst, said the expectation is that Trump would still eventually, though not immediately, call Zelensky and Putin and propose a cease-fire deal in Ukraine along the lines of a plan already floated by his running mate, JD Vance, which appears to hand Russia the Ukrainian territory it already controls.

Under this proposal, a cease-fire would be reached along the current front line, together with the creation of a large demilitarized buffer zone, with new borders to be ratified under later referendums. “If everything goes okay, then Trump will lift sanctions” to pull Moscow out of China’s orbit, Markov said.

But Markov and other analysts said Putin is unlikely to agree to any deal that does not include the complete demilitarization of Ukraine, which even Trump might reject. “Putin wants what no one can give him,” said Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

One possibility though, would be an agreement in which Moscow and Kyiv would halt strikes on energy and power infrastructure, Markov suggested, an arrangement that was already under discussion earlier this summer until Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region thwarted the talks. “This would be a colossal victory for Trump,” Markov said.

Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute for International Relations, said other far-right and far-left political forces in Europe — many of which have been supported by Moscow — could be boosted by Trump’s win.

They could call for a rapprochement with Russia, potentially ushering in a new era in which politics would be dominated by autocrats and in which the winning coalition of Trump, Vance and Musk had introduced a new disruptive ideology. “In a sense, it could be a new realignment in Europe,” Gomart said.

“This is a very good moment against the globalist deep state,” said Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a far-right French former member of the European Parliament, who once facilitated a 9.4 million euro ($10.1 million) loan from a Russian bank for far-right French politician Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign. “It’s a moment for Europe to make a bridge with conservative America” and align with Russia, he said.

“It can be a new era,” Schaffhauser said.

Belton reported from London. Mary Ilyushina in Berlin and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.