General
Whether Trump or Harris, Pessimism Reigns in Russia Over U.S. Election Winner
Russian officials feel disrespected by the Democrats and betrayed by Donald J. Trump, who lavished praise on President Vladimir V. Putin but made decisions the Kremlin saw as benefiting Ukraine.
The Kremlin may quietly prefer that Donald J. Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential elections on Tuesday. But among hard-liners and ordinary Russians, hopes that either candidate could help bring a swift end to the war in Ukraine — by stopping military aid and effectively forcing Kyiv to accept Russia’s occupation of its territory — are low.
And whatever the results, the prospect of improved U.S.-Russia relations seems even more distant.
“We don’t have anyone to root for,” Dmitri Kiselyov, an anchor at the state-run Channel 1 TV station, said on a Sunday show. “That’s why we are just calmly observing,” he asserted, even as the U.S. authorities recently accused Russian operatives of using disinformation to try to sway the election.
In 2016, pro-government officials in Russia’s Parliament celebrated Mr. Trump’s victory by popping dozens of bottles of Champagne.
At that time, there was a genuine belief that the Republican political newcomer could overturn U.S. sanctions against Russia for its illegal annexation in 2014 of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, make changes to the global order by paying less attention to democratic principles and human rights ideals, and, perhaps, even lavish President Vladimir V. Putin with the type of respect he believed he deserved as the leader of a country with 11 time zones.
Eight years later, members of the Russian ruling class are more pessimistic.
“The elections will not change anything for Russia since the candidates’ positions fully reflect the bipartisan consensus on the need for our country to be defeated,” Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former president and prime minister of Russia who now serves as deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, wrote on Monday on Telegram.
That sentiment is prevalent in a Russia that feels scorned and underestimated by Democrat administrations and betrayed by a President Trump who openly praised Mr. Putin but in 2018 reversed Obama-era prohibitions on selling anti-tank weapons to Ukraine.
