“People in [the] West don’t understand,” says Sergei Markov, who runs a pro-Kremlin think tank in Moscow and is the deputy head of the international cooperation committee in the Civic Chamber. “They see that Russian television praises Trump and trashes Clinton. They do this because Trump says nice things about Russia. But the government position is very different from the TV’s because it understands that it’s just words now. And that when the election is over, we will have to deal not with whoever is president but with the American system.”
This is the unanimous view out of Moscow, regardless of analysts’ political proclivities, whether they hate Putin or love him. The desired result in this election has not necessarily been the presidency of Donald Trump. In fact, he seems to them to be rather disposable. The mission is sowing disruption, chaos. And in doing that, Putin will have accomplished something for himself, regardless of who wins next week: a deeply fractured American system, once held up as a shining alternative to Moscow’s style of power, now tarnished beyond recognition.
Even more importantly, Putin will have shown himself to be able to project power far beyond where anyone would have suspected. It’s no longer just in his backyard, like in Georgia and Ukraine — not even in the Middle East. Putin is now able to bring his tactics of asymmetric warfare deep into the belly of his greatest foe, the world’s last superpower. “Putin wants to show himself as a player who can’t be forced to do what America wants and that he can do what he needs, whether the others like it or not,” says independent political analyst Masha Lipman. “Today, everyone understands that you might not like Russia, you might hate it, you might be scared of it, you might want to punish it, but you can’t do anything about it. It can do what it wants. For Putin, Russia’s place in the world is extremely important, both symbolically and practically.”
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