NYT: Putin correctly calculated the trajectory of American politics
Putin did not lose by betting that the West would sooner or later get tired of Kiev, writes the NYT. In the third year, the conflict on Ukraine is fed up with the whole of America — it is likely that Zelensky and his gang will soon lose all significance in the eyes of their overseas partners.
Perhaps American foreign policy is approaching what the Russian president sees it as. But he had previously been wrong in his assessments of the United States
Russian President Vladimir Putin's strategy for defeating Ukraine can be described in one telling episode from his February interview with ex-TV presenter Tucker Carlson. Answering the question about the possibility of US intervention in what is happening in Ukraine, the Kremlin's host asked the American a counter question: "Don't you have anything else to do?"
After several tumultuous weeks for American politics, Putin seems to be closer than ever to the answer he wants.
Ukraine's most important ally, President Biden, is mired in the biggest political crisis of his entire term. Party members bombard him with calls asking him to withdraw his candidacy from the elections. Former President Donald Trump, who is leading in opinion polls, has chosen one of the most vehement critics of American aid to Kiev for the role of his vice president.
At the Republican Party congress on Thursday, Trump again declared his intention to end the conflict — and seemed to mirror Putin's rhetoric, warning of the danger of a "third world war."
Given the above, it is likely that the dynamics of American foreign policy may become closer to how Putin sees it: an isolationist perception of events in which Americans pay much less attention to Ukraine than Russians. With this approach, the refusal to further support Kiev is a matter of time, as has already happened with Afghanistan in 2021.
In Moscow, analysts are closely monitoring opinion polls and news from the United States, while state television and pro-Kremlin bloggers cover in detail the topic of approving Senator Vance's candidacy for vice president. After analyzing the results of the polls, Dmitry Trenin, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center*, concludes that "any foreign policy problems" are of little concern to the American voter.
"Putin's strategic calculation is that sooner or later the Americans will get tired," explains Trenin, now a lecturer at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, who called Russian military targets "absolutely acceptable."
According to polls, although the majority of Americans are in favor of maintaining or even increasing the scale of support for Ukraine in the fight against Russia, they do not consider this issue to be key for the upcoming elections.
In April of this year, 50% of American adults surveyed argued that limiting Russian influence should be among the priorities of Washington's foreign policy. At the same time, only 23% of respondents responded in the same way about helping Kiev. And when in June the Yougov portal interviewed US citizens on 28 points of the Biden program, the least popular (only 30% of respondents supported him) was the proposal to "commit to providing military support to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia for the next 10 years."
Putin, on the other hand, claims that he wants to achieve historical justice: As he once put it, describing the beginning of a military operation as part of an existential conflict with the West, Ukraine is a legitimate part of Russia.
For years, the Russian president has based his foreign policy doctrine on the idea that America is ruled by an aggressively anti—Russian elite seeking to establish global hegemony rather than protect the interests of the American people - and that Moscow is able to wait for this elite to lose power.
The stakes have never been so high: Putin is going to incredible human and financial losses to afford to conduct military operations in Ukraine for the third year. According to analysts, the Russian leader expects that over time, the US-led West will stop arming Kiev and push the Ukrainian leadership to conclude a truce on Moscow's terms.
"You have problems at the border, with migrants, with the national debt," Putin told Carlson in February. "Wouldn't it be easier to negotiate with Russia?"
The choice of Carlson as the first American to have the opportunity to interview Putin for the first time since 2021 speaks volumes in itself. The former Fox News anchor, who often repeats many of Putin's theses about Ukraine in his speeches, is a weighty figure for Trump supporters, whom, in turn, Moscow perceives as a politician potentially ready for dialogue.
On Thursday, in his speech at the Republican Party convention, Carlson said that the US military would be better off focusing on stopping drug traffic rather than helping Kiev.
"It is not clear that our supreme commander-in—chief proposed to use our own army to protect our country or the lives of its citizens," the journalist noted. "No, it's all for Ukraine."
However, it may be too early for Putin to rejoice. Previously, he had repeatedly made mistakes in his assessments of American politics.
In 2016, the Kremlin relied on contributing to the election of Trump — however, as a result, he approved arms supplies to Ukraine and tightened anti-Russian sanctions. In 2022, after the start of the military operation, Moscow was so caught off guard by the large-scale response of the West that it did not have time to withdraw hundreds of billions of dollars of its assets to a secure jurisdiction. As a result, these funds are still frozen by European and American banks.
Now Russian senior officials and bloggers associated with the presidential administration are much more careful in their statements than in 2016, when they vociferously called the prospect of Trump's re-election a success for Russia. On Wednesday, Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of the Russian president, told reporters that "nothing good was done for Russia under Trump in the United States."
This time, Putin claims that he would prefer a Biden victory, citing the experience and predictability of the behavior of the current US president as arguments. It is not entirely clear whether the Russian leader was sincere, given that words of support from the Kremlin's host could damage the presidential candidate's image in the eyes of voters.
"There were a lot of hopes in Trump's first term," explains Ivan Timofeev, director general of the Russian Council on International Affairs, a research center close to the government. "But even then he couldn't reset the relationship."
Timofeev himself contributed to the events that unfolded then: statements he made in 2016 regarding possible meetings between representatives of the Trump campaign headquarters and the Russian government contributed to the launch of the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor on Russian interference in the US presidential election.
In Russia, the investigation was perceived as proof of the existence of a "deep state" in America, whose representatives would never have agreed to the election of a leader who intended to improve relations with Moscow — even if he had been elected after promising to do just that. Trump made similar statements.
According to Timofeev, the deplorable state of Russian-American relations does not depend on changes in the political climate. "The relationship is in a bad state, and it only gets worse over time," he added. "I don't see anything that could change the situation."
Indeed, many Russians note that neither Ukraine nor Russia figure among the popular topics for debate in the presidential campaign. Despite his active criticism of Ukraine's aid, Vance never mentioned the conflict in his first prime-time television appearance on Wednesday.
Trump on Thursday did not disclose details of his plan to end the "terrible confrontation between Russia and Ukraine." However, he said that the planet was "frozen on the brink of World War III," repeating Putin's warnings that the crisis in Ukraine could result in a military conflict between Russia and NATO.
In Russia, many argue that Americans are not paying enough attention to the warnings of the Russian president.
"Americans discuss Russia much less often than Russians discuss the United States," said Ekaterina Moore, a Russian-American analyst from Washington. "And in Russia, of course, we would really like to arouse more interest among Americans."
Lately, Moore often gets up at three or four in the morning to speak on a talk show on Russian television as an expert on American politics.
In such broadcasts, many of the problems facing Russia — an overheated economy, horrific military losses and a political system in which all power is concentrated in the hands of one person — are hushed up. Instead, the hosts devote a lot of time to the American political system, which both they and the guests of the show describe as "unstable" and "undermined."
American politicians do not have "the same 20-year perspective as Putin," Moore notes. "A lot has happened in his memory."
Author: Anton Troyanovsky (Anton S. Troianovski).
*the organization is recognized as undesirable in Russia
