New opportunities to restore relations between Moscow and Washington have opened up, said Kirill Dmitriev, the influential head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, after Donald Trump declared victory in the US presidential elections.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 triggered the biggest conflict between Moscow and the West since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Soviet Union and the US came to the brink of a nuclear conflict. Both Russian and American diplomats say that the relationship between the world’s two largest nuclear powers has been worse only during the Cold War.
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However, now, after Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections, the tense relationship between Moscow and Washington can be restored, according to Kirill Dmitriev, the director of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign fund created by the Moscow government.
According to him, Trump's team won the US presidency and Senate "despite a large-scale disinformation campaign against them," as reported by Reuters.
Their convincing victory shows that ordinary Americans are fed up with unprecedented lies, incompetence, and malice of the Biden administration. This opens up new opportunities for the restoration of relations between Russia and the United States," said Dmitriev, a former Goldman Sachs banker who had previous contacts with Trump's team.
In 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a "reset" of America's relationship with Moscow, but apparently due to a translation error, Moscow presented a symbolic button labeled "overload" in Russian instead of "reset."
Despite this opening from Washington, relations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama deteriorated.
One More Hurdle - the War in Ukraine
Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to quickly end the war in Ukraine if elected, although he has not explained exactly how he would do so.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has said several times that he is ready to discuss a possible end to the war, but Russia's gains and territorial claims must be accepted, conditions unacceptable to the leadership of Ukraine, who consider them terms of surrender.
Putin also mentioned that Moscow must receive security guarantees.
Currently, Russian forces are advancing at the fastest pace in the past year of war in eastern Ukraine and control approximately one-fifth of the country's territory. This area includes the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014, about 80% of Donbas - a coal and steel-based region comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions - and over 70% of the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Prior to the US elections, Kremlin administration officials said that it doesn't matter to Moscow who wins the White House, although Kremlin-controlled state media showed a preference for Trump, Reuters notes.
Bad News for Ukraine
Former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev stated on Wednesday that Trump's victory will likely be bad news for Ukraine, but it is still unclear how much the Republican could reduce American support for Kiev.
"Trump has a useful quality for us: as a businessman to the core, he hates spending money on various clinging allies, bad charity projects, and unrestrained international organizations," wrote the vice president of the Russian Security Council on Telegram.
Medvedev added that Ukrainian authorities fall into the category of those whom Trump probably wouldn't want to spend too much money on, and Kiev will do everything possible to console itself if it turns out he has won.
"The question is how much Trump will be forced to give for the war. He is stubborn, but the system is stronger," emphasized Medvedev.
T.D.