MOSCOW Hardly any Muscovites are eager to comment Donald Trump’s attempted murder on a hot summer day on the Moskva River waterfront.
– Probably Trump will win, but it doesn’t matter much to Russia, the Muscovite Andrei Vorobyov says.
He sees nothing particularly new in the assassination attempt. In the United States, there have often been attempts to kill presidents, sometimes even succeeding.
– It is possible that Trump himself organized it before the election to secure his position, he reflects Sergei.
– It’s politics, it’s normal, he laughs. Russians are often very cynical about politics.
Sergei believes that the Democrats Joe Biden a win would be good for Russia. However, in his opinion, both Biden and Trump should have retired long ago.
– Together with our dearest, Sergei concludes somewhat mysteriously.
The Russian media have already concluded that Trump’s assassination attempt sealed his victory in the US presidential election.
In the United States, Biden’s signs of senility raised a storm after the televised debate in June. For a long time now, Russian state television has gleefully noted Biden’s every mistake and stumble.
The Kremlin talked about an assassination attempt like the Republicans
Tellingly, the Kremlin’s comments on Trump’s assassination attempt reminded Trump’s vice-presidential candidate By JD Vance and the positions of other Republicans. Vance blamed the incident on incitement by the Democrats.
– The central premise of Biden’s campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at any cost. That rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt of President Trump, Senator Vance of Ohio wrote In the X message service, formerly Twitter.
President Vladimir Putin press secretary Dmitry Peskov choose your words in parallel.
– We by no means think that the assassination attempt on presidential candidate Trump was organized by the executive branch, Peskov told reporters on Sunday.
– But the atmosphere that this administration has created during the political struggle, the atmosphere around candidate Trump, has provoked this situation that the United States has now had to face.
Against Russia’s own political climate, Peskov’s comments sound hypocritical. Opposition representatives, human rights activists and war opponents are given long prison sentences and many well-known critics of the Kremlin have met a violent end.
The Russian leadership likes to paint a picture of the United States as a sunset empire, which now has to face the violence it sowed in the world on its own soil.
On the other hand, the Kremlin and its have adopted many chapters from the US Republican culture wars playbook. The “international LGBT movement” has been named an extremist movement, and in his speeches, President Putin has raised concerns about, among other things, the number of gender definitions and gender-neutral toilets in Europe.
Putin’s administration began to profile itself as a vanguard of conservatism already in 2012, when it suppressed the protest movement that broke out after the Duma elections.
The word choices often sound like imported goods. In Russia, the activism for the rights of gender minorities didn’t even have time to develop into an influential movement, before those in power already started to suppress it.
Lavrov praised Vance’s positions on Ukraine
Of course, the Russian leadership has taken note of JD Vance’s appointment as Trump’s vice presidential candidate.
Vance has famously criticized US aid to Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov commented on the matter in New York on Wednesday.
– I’ve heard the same as you, that he’s appearing for peace, for ending aid. We can only welcome it, because it is actually necessary to stop pumping weapons into Ukraine, Lavrov said at his press conference at the UN.
At the same time, in Russia, both experts and politicians are careful not to expect too much from Trump’s victory. The background is the bitter experience of Trump’s presidency in 2017–2021.
US Democrats liked to paint a picture of Trump as a man of the Kremlin, but Trump is above all about Trump. At the same time, the US president is not omnipotent either.
The meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki in 2018 ultimately did not promote anything. Like so many of Trump’s foreign policy projects, it ended up being more big show than concrete.
Russia did not get relief from Trump like his predecessor Barack Obama’s to the sanctions stipulated in the period. Sanctions, on the other hand, increased during the Trump era, and the United States also began supplying Ukraine with lethal military equipment, which Obama had avoided.
Still, Russia probably has cautious hopes for Trump.
“Despite the very serious sanctions, there was dialogue, and it is useful in any case,” Lavrov said of the Trump era.
Russian official representatives do not voice these wishes. When Putin was asked in February which of the candidates would be better for Russia, he replied that it was Biden.
– He is a more experienced, predictable, old-style politician, Putin reasoned.
It could be that Putin wanted both to poke a little bit at Biden and to avoid putting a foot in the wheel of the Trump campaign. On the other hand, Trump’s unpredictability may still be a headache for the Russian leadership if he returns to the American leadership.