Trump as President is a different matter. The last weeks before the vote were telling: the tone of Russian state media shifted, and news sources did not praise Trump so much as relish the foul state of the election, throwing a pox on everyone’s house. The country’s most bombastic television host, Dmitry Kiselyov, declared the U.S. campaign so “horribly noxious that it only engenders disgust toward what is still inexplicably called a ‘democracy’ in America.” The victor will be a lame duck from the start, he declared. “Threat of impeachment will hang over whoever wins the White House.” It could be inferred that the Kremlin was preparing for the enemy it knew, and only hoped she would enter power as weakened and distracted as possible. [...]
It is hard to imagine that Trump will push Moscow hard about Ukraine, where Russia has supplied arms, money, diplomatic cover, and Army soldiers to prop up separatists in the rebel-held east. Given Europe’s waning interest, Kiev will be more alone than ever. (The government of Petro Poroshenko may have to finally get serious about confronting the country’s real enemy: a corrosive oligarchy and unchecked corruption.) Regarding the rest of the region, Trump’s skeptical statements about nato unnerve leaders in the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. It’s not that Russia has territorial designs on those states—at least, not for the moment—but any provocations meant to test nato’s security guarantees are less likely to face resistance when the alliance’s largest military is led by a man who wonders aloud about the whole point of the thing. In Syria, Trump’s preference for a bomb-first approach that elevates the danger of the Islamic State above the horror of Bashar al-Assad is nicely suited to Putin’s own policy there. More broadly—and perhaps most important for Putin—Trump’s alpha-male fondness for Putin, combined with his self-professed willingness to make a deal on just about anything, suggests that he is willing to see the world as Putin does: a Second World War map waiting to be divided up between the great and powerful, in the manner of Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta.
Yet Putin must surely be worried about exactly what he is getting in the next U.S. President. Alexei Venediktov, who is the editor of Echo of Moscow, a liberal radio station, and who has extensive contacts in the Russian élite, told me a story about Putin’s reaction to the Brexit vote, last June. The word in Moscow was that, by creating a crisis for E.U. unity, Brexit was a positive thing for Russia. “A part of our political establishment was celebrating the result, congratulating one another,” Venediktov said. “But at the first foreign-policy meeting that Putin led that morning, he told them, roughly speaking, ‘What’s wrong with you, have you gone crazy? Economic turbulence in Europe will now hit us, too. What have we won?’ “
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