Donald Trump and the Russians: Brazen meddling

The Kremlin prefers a Trump victory, but its feelings are mixed

THE plan was, as Donald Trump might put it, “yuuuge”: a statue of Christopher Columbus taller than the Statue of Liberty, donated by the Russian government, to be built on the banks of New York’s Hudson river. “It’s got $40m-worth of bronze in it,” Mr Trump bragged of the design by Zurab Tsereteli, a Moscow-based monumental sculptor, in 1997. But the project never came to fruition. The statue found a home only this year, in Puerto Rico (see picture).

Now Russia is hoping Mr Trump’s run at the American presidency will prove more successful, and the Kremlin appears to be trying to give him a boost. American officials believe Russia hacked the e-mails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that appeared in July on WikiLeaks. 

The Washington Post reports that American spooks are investigating “a broad covert Russian operation” to sow distrust in the elections. Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, suggested that Mr Trump had become an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation”.

That may be taking things a bit far. Moscow clearly prefers Mr Trump, largely because it hates Hillary Clinton’s interventionist foreign-policy views. But many Russian officials are worried by the disruptive potential of a Trump presidency. “If he ends up in the White House, does it mean he’ll actually begin to fulfil all his chaotic promises?” asks Valery Garbuzov, head of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute for the USA and Canada.

Vladimir Putin is clearly pleased with Mr Trump’s praise for him. (“He’s been a leader, far more than our president,” Mr Trump said this week.) And the Kremlin is thrilled by Mr Trump’s statements deriding NATO, applauding Brexit, and suggesting that America might not defend allies threatened by Russia. “His views on America’s role in the world completely align with the hopes that Russia has always had,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian foreign-policy expert.

Stylistically, too, Mr Trump is Mr Putin’s type: a man ready to make a deal. Like Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian leader 

and pal of Mr Putin, Mr Trump seems unlikely to put politically correct talk of Western values ahead of mutual interests. That he may harm the Western alliance in the process is a welcome bonus. “Trump will smash America as we know it, we’ve got nothing to lose,” writes Konstantin Rykov, a former Duma deputy.

Mr Putin’s circle has also been encouraged by Mr Trump’s use of advisers sympathetic to Moscow. His former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, previously worked for Ukraine’s ex-president, Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally. Carter Page, a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a speech in Moscow this summer denouncing America’s “hypocritical focus on… democratisation”. Late last year another adviser, General Michael Flynn, a former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency, popped up in Moscow at an anniversary dinner for RT, the Kremlin-backed broadcaster. He spent part of the evening seated next to Mr Putin.

Yet, as with many of Mr Trump’s proposals, it is unclear how committed he is to his pronouncements on Russia policy, if at all. There is no evidence that his campaign has received Russian money. Mr Trump’s business interests in Russia amount to little, though not for want of trying: his multiple attempts to crack the Moscow property market, beginning with a trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, all fell through. If anything, this suggests a lack of well-placed Kremlin connections rather than the opposite. His most successful venture involved bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. While Mr Trump hoped Mr Putin would attend—tweeting “Will he become my new best friend?”—the Russian president never made it.

Foreign-policy professionals in Moscow understand the risks of Mr Trump’s unpredictability. “If Trump wins, it’s an equation where everything is unknown. There, x times y equals z,” says Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Russian senate’s foreign-affairs committee. While Mrs Clinton is seen as fiercely anti-Russian, she is a familiar figure, and even commands grudging respect. “As a rule, it is easier to deal with experienced professionals,” wrote Igor Ivanov, a former foreign minister, in a recent column in Rossiskaya Gazyeta, a government newspaper.

Regardless of who takes the White House, Russia’s presence at the centre of American electoral politics is celebrated in Moscow. While Russian officials deny allegations of meddling, the accusations also reinforce the sense of Mr Putin’s power. The focus on Russia in the American campaign is “a true acknowledgment that Russia has returned to the international arena as a real factor in world politics”, says Mr Kosachev. That, perhaps even more than Mr Trump’s victory, is what the Kremlin truly craves.

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