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