Eight years ago, after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the mood in Moscow was one of lucky disbelief. In Donald Trump, Russian officials saw a transactional businessman who spoke in the language of national interests, not values—Vladimir Putin’s kind of leader. Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the Russian state channel, declared that she would drive around the streets of Moscow waving an American flag. A nationalist politician threw a party in the offices of the Duma, with champagne toasts. For Russia, however, Trump’s first term turned out to be a disappointment: the U.S. introduced more sanctions, expelled Russian diplomats, closed Russian consulates across the U.S., and delivered antitank Javelin missiles to Ukraine.
So, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Russian officials—including Putin—appeared generally unmoved by the possible outcomes, including the return of Trump to the Presidency. Putin offered only cryptic, mixed messages, joking about Biden calling him a “crazy S.O.B.,” or wryly noting Kamala Harris’s “infectious” laugh. Putin’s telegraphed disinterest—as much a pose as a policy—came from an awareness that Trump, in his first term, had proved to be incapable of delivering a new geopolitical grand bargain for Russia, and that the invasion of Ukraine had plunged Russia’s relations with the U.S. into a freeze too deep for any one figure to resurrect. “The élite became absolutely convinced it doesn’t matter who is in power in Washington,” Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper publisher close to the Kremlin, told me.
Now that Trump has won, that pose of indifference has given way to a mood of “cautious optimism,” as one person in Moscow’s foreign-policy circles put it. “A certain political consolidation looks possible—Americans are dissatisfied with the ideology of neoliberalism and instead chose a self-proclaimed defender of national interests,” the person said. “This fits very nicely into the Russian picture of the world.”
Last week, at a policy forum in Sochi, Putin congratulated Trump and, in an appeal to his vanity, complimented his courage in the face of an assassination attempt in July. Putin tried to downplay his enthusiasm for Trump’s victory, but it was clear he sensed an opportunity. Another source familiar with policy discussions said, of Putin, “He is in a very good mood. It’s about more than just Trump. He’s sure of his own rightness. Everything is developing—in Ukraine and beyond—more or less as he imagined.”
The war in Ukraine will certainly be the main agenda item between Putin and Trump. In recent months, Russian forces have been advancing in the Donbas, in Ukraine’s east, and have seized more territory in October than in any month since the start of the war, nearly three years ago. Russian losses are enormous—more than forty thousand troops were killed or injured in October, according to the U.K.’s defense minister, John Healey—but, on the current trajectory, Russia is gaining the advantage. “That’s how it’s often been in Russian history,” Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs,