Kremlin officials wishing for a Trump victory - while claiming otherwise ( www.themoscowtimes.com )
Russia’s leadership is following the U.S. presidential campaign in private with excitement and interest — and are rooting for their favorite candidate, Donald Trump, to win, three government and presidential administration officials, three Foreign Ministry officials, former officials and two sources from Russia’s business elite told The Moscow Times.
Officials in the Kremlin, the government and the Russian establishment hope that Trump — whose 2016 election victory was tainted with allegations of Russian meddling — will unseat President Joe Biden, one of Ukraine’s staunchest backers during Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.
All of The Moscow Times’ sources agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, citing concern for their careers for speaking publicly about private political matters.
[...]
Moscow is making a concerted effort to downplay the significance of the U.S. election in officials’ public statements, one current Foreign Ministry official said.
"In our public statements, we aim to emphasize that the U.S. elections are not important to Russia. Our task is to downplay the importance of the U.S. elections," the official said.
But behind closed doors, the Kremlin, the Foreign Ministry, and Russia’s intelligence agencies are closely analyzing the election.
"Officials and diplomats are monitoring both the debates themselves and the reaction to them in the U.S. and elsewhere,” Boris Bondarev, a former member of Russia's delegation to the UN in Geneva who quit in protest of the invasion of Ukraine, told The Moscow Times.
“In general, the open transparent politics in the U.S. compared to Russia gives a huge amount of information," he added.
[...] in February 2024, Putin said that he believed Russia could benefit from a Biden victory.
"When Putin said he supported Biden, he was not joking,” a former senior Kremlin official told The Moscow Times. “He was trying to deliberately damage the current U.S. president, realizing how this kind of ‘support’ would be perceived in the States, especially in the current climate.”
[...]
"Psychologically, it will be easier to build communication with Trump than with Biden. Biden has already said a lot of things about Putin — that he is a murderer, a war criminal, etc.," the current Russian diplomat said.
“After all this, it is difficult to take a modest first step toward dialogue. Trump doesn't have these limitations in this sense,” he said.
[...]
"Trump's appeal to the Kremlin lies in his "poorly concealed sympathy for dictators in general and Putin in particular," ex-diplomat Bondarev said. [Boris Bondarev is a a former member of Russia's delegation to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, who quit in protest of the invasion of Ukraine.]
