Russian Media Lukewarm on the Return of the Trump
Putin’s propagandists are less elated than eight years ago—but is it all an act?
DONALD TRUMP’S ELECTION VICTORY has been the subject of days of discussion in both the official Russian media and in the independent media now located almost entirely abroad—and the reactions are sometimes surprising, sometimes thought-provoking and sometimes . . . well, bonkers.
Vladimir Putin, as usual, set the tone. During an appearance at the Valdai discussion forum on Thursday, Putin finally congratulated Donald Trump on his election victory—though not in person. He was cagey, however, on what Trump’s return to the White House would mean for Russian-American relations or for the war in Ukraine, saying that he had no idea what Trump was going to do and noting that “for him, it’s the last presidential term, after all” (an observation that must have made at least a few in the audience recall that Putin has now been in power, as president and prime minister, for nearly a quarter of a century). He also said that he wouldn’t necessarily be averse to calling Trump: “I’m just not doing it because from a certain point on, the leaders of Western states were calling me almost every week, and then suddenly stopped.” It’s a mystery! (The transcripts of Putin’s statements about Trump are available in Russian on the official Kremlin website, but curiously, not in the English translation.)
While the official Russian media sometimes echoed MAGA narratives during the campaign, their reaction to Trump’s victory has been more muted than in 2016, when “Trump nash”—“Trump is our guy,” or “Trump is one of us”—was a meme of state-run news and the Duma broke out the champagne to celebrate his win. Eight years later, Olga Skabeyeva, chief propagandist of the state-run Rossiya-1 channel’s 60 Minutes program, sarcastically alluded to that toast to Trump: “On the day of the American election, they joyfully broke out the champagne in Russia, but not for the occasion of Trump’s victory,” she said in her Wednesday broadcast. “It was to celebrate, in accordance with our tradition, the launch of the nuclear icebreaker Chukotka.” Still in sarcastic mode, she noted that Putin’s full schedule had not left him enough time to congratulate Trump; his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, had said Putin had no such plans and that, in any case, the United States is currently an adversary because of its involvement with Ukraine.
The program’s report from the United States featured an interview with a middle-aged guy in a MAGA hat outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago victory party who sent Russians a message of peace and even sang, in clumsy Russian, а verse from a popular Soviet peace song from the 1960s (illustrating, yet again, the full convergence of the MAGA right with the Ronald Reagan–era left). Skabeyeva, however, was distinctly skeptical of Trump’s own peacenik tendencies:
We’re familiar with Donald’s temperament. First, he offers a deal that is to his advantage; then, if the other party doesn’t accept it, he starts threatening them with a baseball bat. It may be the same thing with Ukraine. First, Trump will offer, in the form of an ultimatum, negotiations that will be solely in America’s interest, and if Moscow doesn’t agree he’ll give Kyiv long-range weapons and permission to strike deep inside our territory. If Kyiv doesn’t agree, he’ll choke off their aid.
The tone on Channel One’s political show Time Will Tell ranged between wary and hopeful. One guest, political analyst Andrei Klintsevich, suggested that Trump was mainly interested in trade wars and might well try to wind down U.S. involvement in military conflicts to focus on business ones—in which case, he “may go down in history as a great peacemaker.” Another, Duma member Dmitry Novikov, argued that Trump or no Trump, it was in America’s interest to draw out the war in Ukraine in order to weaken Russia, so it was best not to get one’s hopes up. (Novikov, who represents the Communist Party in Russia’s Potemkin parliament, also took a moment to jeer at the idea that Kamala Harris was a Communist or a Marxist: “Of course she’s an anti-Communist and an anti-Marxist.”)
Time Will Tell also added a heavy dose of conspiracy theories. If Trump tried to be a peacemaker, “Will they let him?” worried host Olesya Loseva. After all, look what happened to John F. Kennedy, an advocate of negotiations! And look what happened to Richard Nixon after he initiated détente with the Soviet Union! In a later portion of the show, Duma member Mikhail Delyagin speculated that the Deep State could still try to steal the election (even if he admitted that he couldn’t figure out how they would be able to do it) and revealed that the Deep State had engineered the financial crisis of 2008 in order to install Barack Obama, “the candidate of Hollywood and of the social networks,” in the White House. Another guest, journalist Nikolai Starikov, had a different theory: Instead of stealing the election, the Deep State had “stolen a candidate.” The shooting in Pennsylvania in July, Starikov explained, was intended as a message to Trump that he would be murdered if he didn’t play along, and Trump got the message and swore allegiance to the Deep State.
Aside from these excursions into Alex Jones territory (then again, a lot of official Russian TV is Alex Jones territory), Time Will Tell tended toward the Trump-friendly, with much tut-tutting about the deplorable incivility shown toward Trump by the Democrats and the obligatory clip from the Russian political establishment’s darling American pundit, Tucker Carlson.
On the other hand, the Kremlin’s top propaganda jock, Vladimir Solovyov, took a “pox on both their houses” view: Trump or Harris, “what differences does it make to us? America is our enemy—not the American people, but the American political establishment. Maybe they’ll come back to their senses someday, then we’ll see. But the chances of that are close to zero.” His colleague, Dmitry Kiselyov (the charming fellow who once mused that Russia was the only country capable of turning the United States to “radioactive ash”), expressed a similar view, saying that Russia had “no one to root for” in the American election.
Not everyone got the message. Some elderly activists from a clownish “movement” known as “Putin’s Platoons” recorded video clips rejoicing in Trump’s victory and inviting him to take his guidance from “our smart Putin.” And Alexander Dugin, the fascist ideologue and master troll, was positively exultant, proclaiming that “Trump’s and Vance’s victory is our victory” and a “watershed” in which “traditional values” had triumphed over “nontraditional and antitraditional” values. In a blog post, Dugin asserted that America’s vote was a conscious choice of “someone like Putin.” Yet, interestingly, he has also cautioned against letting Trump draw Moscow into negotiations on Ukraine, since Trump would likely “lean toward hasty and superficial solutions” and “Atlanticists” in his entourage would easily trick him into endorsing a “toxic” deal Russia could not accept.
SO WHAT DOES THE (MOSTLY EXILED) anti-Putin elite think of Trump? Opinions differ. In an interview, economist and former deputy minister of energy Vladimir Milov said that the Trump skepticism expressed by Russian politicians and propagandists was a deliberate maskirovka to camouflage the regime’s support for Trump.
Milov’s prognosis for the coming Trump presidency was grim, from the perspective of Putin’s foes: Trump, he predicted, would “drastically weaken” economic sanctions on Russia, either by openly lifting them or by covertly directing administration officials not to enforce them. Milov also believes that Putin had, all along, banked on Trump to extend to him the lifeline he needs to continue the war—and that he correctly sees Trump as an ally of sorts, someone who shares his hatred and scorn for liberalism. Émigré political analyst Abbas Galyamov concurs, telling an interviewer that Trump’s election is a “light at the end of the tunnel” for the Putin regime:
He has a foundational trait that is very important for Putin. He himself is a man of the authoritarian type, essentially an autocrat for whom democracy is not merely an empty word but an annoyance. . . . In that sense, he and Putin are allies. Putin is actually a role model for him—a man who embarked on an authoritarian course and demonstrates that this is normal, this is possible. . . . Because of that, Trump regards Putin as fundamentally an equal partner, an “okay guy.”
While there may be frictions between Trump and Putin over particular issues, Galyamov said, Trump would be perfectly happy with an arrangement in which he and Putin “divide the world” into spheres of influence—and just as happy to assign Ukraine to Putin’s part of the pie: “For Putin, for the Kremlin, this is a gift on a foundational, existential level.”
Yet other dissident commentators disagree. In an interview on TV Rain, chess legend and democracy activist Garry Kasparov—who spoke out vehemently against Trump during the campaign—decried Trump’s populist promises and warned about the weakening of checks and balances; but he also suggested that Trump’s unpredictability could pose problems for Putin. “It will be interesting to see what he does with regard to the war in Ukraine, for example,” said Kasparov. “I wouldn’t say that it’s the end of the world and that Trump will drastically change everything.” He also suggested that some of Trump’s proposals, such as increasing oil production and potentially causing oil prices to collapse, could cause real damage to the Kremlin’s war machine. (Milov disagrees, pointing out that for all of Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” talk, oil production in the United States is already booming.)
Others, such as exiled lawyer and podcaster Mark Feygin, predicted that Trump’s attempt to force Russia and Ukraine into a peace that lets Russia keep occupied territories would quickly crumble against Putin’s refusal to accept anything less than total domination of Ukraine. YouTuber Michael Nacke, who backed Harris during the campaign but was scathingly critical of the Biden administration’s timidity in helping Ukraine, saw a cause for cautious optimism in the fact that the big idea floated so far by Trump advisers—freezing the current front lines—would not be acceptable to Putin any more than it would be acceptable to Volodymyr Zelensky. It would mean, for one thing, that Ukraine gets to keep most of the territory Russia wrote into its constitution as new Russian provinces in September 2022—not to mention a part of Russia’s own Kursk region.
Other Russian dissidents, such as former Ekho Moskvy radio host Tatiana Felgengauer, saw reasons for hope in Trump’s “unpredictability”: Felgengauer pointed out that Trump’s first term had disappointed the Putin regime and that “the incredible joy at his victory started shrinking more and more until it disappeared completely.” And Alexander Nevzorov, the exiled Russian TV journalist turned snarky anti-Russian pundit on YouTube, who had rooted for Harris during the election and made no secret of his contempt for Trump, nonetheless insisted that the rejoicing in some pro-Kremlin quarters was not only premature but downright delusional—akin to “mental patients celebrating the arrival of a new head doctor.”
Several Russian dissident pundits, including Nevzorov, have made a larger point: For all of the Putin regime’s bluster about the end of American hegemony and Russia’s restored great-power status, the Russian political establishment’s breathless focus on the U.S. election demonstrates the extent to which the United States still shapes the fate of the world, including Russia’s.
And another thing: In the words of another exiled Russian journalist, Ilya Shepelin, “For once, Russian news was finally covering a presidential election whose outcome wasn’t known in advance. Not because such an election was held in Russia, but because they were covering news from the United States.”