Russia’s Trump fans: Our American cousin

Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s win. Strangely, so do some of his opponents

RUSSIAN lawmakers burst into applause when news of Donald Trump’s victory reached Moscow. The White House will be home to a candidate whose chumminess with Russia provoked one former CIA director to call him an “unwitting agent” of Vladimir Putin. Announcing Mr Trump’s victory in the Kremlin’s gilded ceremonial hall, Mr Putin said he welcomed the opportunity to “restore full-fledged relations with the United States”. 

Russia’s state-controlled media, which thrive on anti-American propaganda, could hardly hide their glee. “I want to ride around Moscow with an American flag in the window of the car,” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the state-backed network that actively promoted Mr Trump’s candidacy.

Mr Trump’s victory has been portrayed both inside and outside Russia as another example of Mr Putin’s luck. The Russian leader views America’s liberal democratic order, which encourages political and economic openness around the world, as a threat to his own system of closed governing networks dominated by the security services. An isolationist America bogged down in political infighting is much less of a threat to Mr Putin. Russian liberals are in despair; hardliners are cheering. Russia’s neighbours are fretting about the withdrawal of Western backing to deter Russian aggression. Mr Putin is hoping for a deal with Mr Trump, similar to the 1945 Yalta agreement, to carve out a Russian sphere of influence.

Yet Mr Trump’s victory may prove more problematic for the Kremlin than it seems. Mr Trump’s friendly campaign rhetoric about Russia is no guarantee of co-operation. (Barack Obama also launched a reset of relations with Russia when he came into office.) Whereas Hillary Clinton offered a predictable, albeit hostile, line on Russia, Mr Trump is shrouded in uncertainty. “If America is the devil, better the devil we know,” says Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, a think-tank.

Anti-Americanism is one of the pillars of the Kremlin’s propaganda strategy, which portrays Russia as a besieged fortress. Mrs Clinton would have been an ideal enemy. With a friendlier President Trump in office, state television may have to fall back instead on lampooning American politics and Mr Trump himself. But while Mr Obama largely ignored Russia’s often racist attacks on him, insulting Mr Trump is riskier: he may take it personally. More importantly, Mr Trump’s victory—part of a global populist backlash against the political status quo—is an ominous sign for Mr Putin and his wealthy cronies, who have held power for more than 16 years. If Russians grow angry at their corrupt elite, there is only one target for their anger.

This may explain why two of Mr Putin’s fiercest opponents are more sanguine about Mr Trump’s victory. One is Mikheil Saakashvili, a former president of Georgia who fought a short war with Russia in 2008. The other is Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger who galvanised anti-Putin protests in Moscow in 2011-2012.

As political outsiders and proud nationalists who have campaigned against corruption and the political establishment, both Mr Saakashvili and Mr Navalny feel they have more in common with Mr Trump than Mr Putin does. “I don’t believe this is a crisis of America or of Europe. It is simply a swing of the political pendulum, which is what happens in a democracy,” says Mr Navalny. “I wish our politics could be as dynamic.”

Mr Saakashvili was brought in by the new Ukrainian government as governor of Odessa in 2015, charged with stamping out corruption. He thinks Mr Trump’s predecessors failed to stand up to Mr Putin and were repeatedly outmanoeuvred. Hillary Clinton, he argues, pushed for a reset of Russian-American relations after the war in Georgia in 2008, and opposed the Magnitsky Act, which punishes Russian officials accused of involvement in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer, in 2009. The Obama administration pressured Ukraine not to confront Russia militarily in Crimea and refused to provide it with lethal weapons, despite a 1994 pledge to uphold its territorial integrity.

Worse, says Mr Saakashvili, America has propped up Ukraine’s oligarchic elite in the misplaced belief that they are necessary to block Russian interference. “[American officials] kept telling me, ‘don’t rock the boat’, but the boat was sinking,” says Mr Saakashvili. Earlier this week he resigned as governor, accusing his erstwhile ally, President Petro Poroshenko, of abetting corruption. He also believes America’s policy of encouraging Ukraine to reintegrate its separatist eastern provinces is ruinous. “The less America interferes in Ukraine at this point, the better,” he says.

If Mr Saakashvili’s and Mr Navalny’s views of a Trump presidency seem overly optimistic, those of Russia’s establishment probably are, too. Many Russians have been hoping for an American leader more like their own. They may regret it.

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