The New Yorker:

The Trump Administration will likely take the lead in any negotiations to end the war—a development that Vladimir Putin would welcome.

By Joshua Yaffa

Eight years ago, after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the mood in Moscow was one of lucky disbelief. In Donald Trump, Russian officials saw a transactional businessman who spoke in the language of national interests, not values—Vladimir Putin’s kind of leader. Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the Russian state channel, declared that she would drive around the streets of Moscow waving an American flag. A nationalist politician threw a party in the offices of the Duma, with champagne toasts. For Russia, however, Trump’s first term turned out to be a disappointment: the U.S. introduced more sanctions, expelled Russian diplomats, closed Russian consulates across the U.S., and delivered antitank Javelin missiles to Ukraine.

So, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Russian officials—including Putin—appeared generally unmoved by the possible outcomes, including the return of Trump to the Presidency. Putin offered only cryptic, mixed messages, joking about Biden calling him a “crazy S.O.B.,” or wryly noting Kamala Harris’s “infectious” laugh. Putin’s telegraphed disinterest—as much a pose as a policy—came from an awareness that Trump, in his first term, had proved to be incapable of delivering a new geopolitical grand bargain for Russia, and that the invasion of Ukraine had plunged Russia’s relations with the U.S. into a freeze too deep for any one figure to resurrect. “The élite became absolutely convinced it doesn’t matter who is in power in Washington,” Konstantin Remchukov, a newspaper publisher close to the Kremlin, told me.

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