Putin Ponder Beating Ukraine if Trump Wins But Putin and Trump have Been Wrong Before

 

 By Anton Troianovski

Reporting from Berlin

 

President Vladimir V. Putin’s strategy for defeating Ukraine can be summed up in one revealing moment in his February interview with the former television host Tucker Carlson. Addressing the possibility of heightened U.S. involvement in Ukraine, the Russian leader asked Americans: “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

After several tumultuous weeks in American politics, Mr. Putin appears closer than ever to getting the answer he seeks.

President Biden, Ukraine’s most important ally, is engulfed in the biggest political crisis of his tenure, with calls from fellow Democrats to withdraw from the presidential race. Former President Donald J. Trump, favored in the polls, has picked as his running mate one of the loudest critics of American aid to Kyiv.

At the Republican National Convention Thursday night, Mr. Trump renewed his pledge to end the fighting and channeled Mr. Putin in warning of “World War III.” 

All told the arc of American foreign policy could be moving closer to Mr. Putin’s expectations of it: an inward-looking worldview that cares far less about Ukraine than Russians do, making it only a matter of time until Washington abandons Kyiv like its critics say Afghanistan was abandoned in 2021.

In Moscow, analysts are poring over American polls and news reports, while state television and pro-Kremlin blogs have featured extensive coverage of Mr. Trump’s pick of Senator J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential candidate. Dmitri Trenin, the former head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said his conclusion from the polling is that “all foreign problems” are low on the priority list for American voters.

“Putin’s strategic calculus is built on this: at some point, Americans will get tired,” said Mr. Trenin, who now teaches at a Moscow university and described Russia’s war aims as “completely appropriate.”

Polls show that while most Americans favor maintaining or increasing support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, they do not see it as a key electoral issue.  

While 50 percent of American adults told the Pew Research Center in April that limiting Russian influence should be a top foreign policy priority, only 23 percent said the same of support for Ukraine. And when YouGov surveyed Americans in June on 28 policies proposed by Mr. Biden, the least popular one — with 30 percent backing — was “pledging 10 years of U.S. military support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.”

   

Mr. Putin, on the other hand, claims he is pursuing historical justice: Ukraine is a rightful part of Russia, he has said, describing his invasion as part of an existential conflict with the West.

He has shaped his foreign policy for years around the idea that America is led by a virulently anti-Russian elite pursuing world hegemony rather than the best interests of the American public — and that Russia can outlast that elite.

The stakes in that bet have never been as high as they are now, with Mr. Putin accepting enormous costs in lives and treasure to wage his third year of war in Ukraine. Analysts believe that Mr. Putin expects that eventually, the American-led West will stop arming Ukraine and push its leaders into an armistice on Russia’s terms.

“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Carlson in February. “Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia?” 

That Mr. Putin chose Mr. Carlson for his first interview with an American news outlet since 2021 was in itself revealing. A former Fox News host who often echoes Mr. Putin’s talking points on Ukraine, Mr. Carlson is a leading figure among Mr. Trump’s base, which Moscow views as potentially sympathetic.

In his speech to the Republican convention on Thursday, Mr. Carlson said the American military should be attacking drug supply routes into the United States rather than supporting Ukraine.

“You don’t see our commander in chief suggesting that we use our military to protect our country or the lives of its citizens,” Mr. Carlson said. “No, that’s for Ukraine.”

Mr. Trump clapping while surrounded by photographers in a convention hall.

Former President Donald J. Trump during the third day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, on Wednesday. 

But it appears too soon for Mr. Putin to celebrate. His calculations about American policies have repeatedly been proved wrong. 

The Kremlin bet on helping elect Mr. Trump in 2016, only to see him ship weapons to Ukraine and tighten sanctions against Russia. In 2022, when Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, Russia was so caught off guard by the severity of the Western response that it didn’t have time to move hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian Central Bank reserves to safety. As a result, they were frozen in Europe and the United States.

Russian officials and Kremlin-linked commentators are now far more cautious than they were in 2016 in casting a potential Trump re-election as a win for Russia. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday that “under Trump, there wasn’t much good being done for Russia.”

This time around, Mr. Putin has said he would prefer a victory for Mr. Biden, citing the president’s experience and predictable behavior. It was not clear the endorsement was genuine, given that support from Mr. Putin could damage a candidate’s standing among American voters.

“There were many hopes in the first term of the Trump presidency,” said Ivan Timofeev, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research group close to the Russian government. “But even back then, Trump wasn’t able to turn the relationship around.”

Mr. Timofeev was a bit player in that drama: his communications in 2016 about possible meetings between the Trump campaign and the Russian government were an early focus of the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special prosecutor who investigated Russian interference in the presidential election. 

The Mueller inquiry was widely seen in Russia as evidence of an American “deep state” that would never accept a leader seeking to improve relations with Moscow, even if he had been elected after promising to do so. Mr. Trump made similar arguments.

The dire state of U.S.-Russia relations is immune to the political winds, Mr. Timofeev said. “The relationship is bad, and gradually getting worse,” he added. “I don’t see what can change the situation.”

 

Indeed, some Russians have noted that neither Ukraine nor Russia are coming up much in the U.S. presidential campaign these days. Mr. Vance, for all his criticism of Ukraine aid, did not mention the war in his prime-time speech on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump, in his speech Thursday, offered no details about how he would end “the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine.” But he did say the globe was “teetering on the edge of World War III,” echoing Mr. Putin’s warnings that the Ukraine war was spiraling into a military conflict between Russia and NATO. 

In Russia, many say that Americans are paying insufficient attention to those warnings.

“They’re talking about Russia in America far less than they do in Russia about America,” said Ekaterina Moore, a Russian American commentator based in Washington. “And in Russia, they would of course really like Russia to be more interesting to America.”

Ms. Moore has been getting up at 3 or 4 a.m. on many recent mornings to appear on talk shows on Russian state television as an analyst of U.S. politics.

On those shows, the many challenges facing Russia — an overheated economy, the staggering war casualties, and a system in which power is concentrated in the hands of one man — are elided. Instead, they focus at length on an American political system that both hosts and guests describe as fickle and broken.

American politicians “don’t have the 20-year-long view that Putin has,” Ms. Moore said. “He’s seen a lot.”

Ruth Igielnik, Alina Lobzina, and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. More about Anton Troianovski