Even while Vladimir Putin does what he can to help Donald Trump salvage something from this month’s midterm elections, the Russian President is working on the assumption that the Republicans will lose badly. And he’s OK with that.
The Kremlin’s goal is, after all, to see the West paralysed by internal division and dispute, and it sees a humiliated Trump as a disruptive one.
Mired in a badly conceived and legally questionable war in the Gulf, with petrol and other prices rising and his erratic personal style increasingly counting against him, Trump has looked to Moscow for help.
The deal to buy Russian diesel will do little for prices at the pump, but gave Trump what he always craves: a splashy initiative to seize the news cycle, if only for a few days. Of course, it gave Putin a great deal more, not least in pitting Kyiv against the White House.
Last week, Putin also freed Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old US citizen who had been given seven years in prison on charges of being a mercenary fighting for Ukraine. Trump was allowed to take the credit, telling reporters he asked Putin “could you let Steven Hubbard out, please? And he agreed to do it”.
As if this were not enough credit for the Trumps, the Kremlin has made much of the fact that a ceasefire it has agreed with Kyiv to allow residents of the beleaguered town of Oleshky to receive aid or simply flee the fighting, was driven by the First Lady, Melania.
These are cheap and easy gestures for Putin to make, enough to keep Trump mollified but hardly likely to have much of an effect on the US elections.
The Russians seem to have no illusions about this. “We’ve always known that [Trump] was self-indulgent and self-destructive,” a Russian political commentator told The i Paper. “The only question was when he was going to sink his own ship.”
For all the talk in some Western circles about Trump being a “Russian asset”, either controlled by their intelligence services or eternally bamboozled by Putin, Moscow seems remarkably sanguine about the prospect of his suffering a humiliating setback in the midterms.
The reason for this is that the Russians themselves have long regarded Trump as periodically useful, but never reliable. When he was inaugurated in 2025, Russian pundits and officials alike repeatedly hammered home a simple message to their own people: Trump is not our friend. He is not our enemy, something that they accused his predecessor Joe Biden of being. However, he is driven by his own interests. Sometimes those interests will coincide with Russia’s, but at other times they will diverge.
Trump has certainly been helpful for Putin, not least in his desire to make Kyiv swallow a peace deal that reflects Russian interests. At the same time, Moscow has had to swallow seeing its Venezuelan client toppled, seen European countries ramp up their defence spending at his behest and watched Trump oscillate between damning and praising the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
However, what the Kremlin does appreciate is that Trump is a sore loser, and a man who cultivates his grudges enthusiastically. Even in victory, he has sacked critics, denigrated rivals and pursued enemies in a campaign which the New York Times called “far more expansive, creative, efficient… than anticipated”.
The midterms may result in the Democrats winning both houses of Congress. However, foreign policy in particular tends to be much more the remit of the White House. While the Kremlin anticipates that there will be renewed efforts to restore and strengthen sanctions on Russia, as well as offering aid to Kyiv, it expects this to be gridlocked or at least slowed by intransigence from the Oval Office.
Indeed, it may make Trump all the more desperate to press his peace process, as a last chance to secure his legacy and the Nobel Peace Prize he seems so inexplicably convinced is his by right.
More broadly, the Kremlin believes he will be out for revenge, and will lash out at both Democratic rivals and Republicans whom he feels have let him down. Given his track record for operating with little concern for decency, accuracy, protocol and legality, this may well be a deeply destructive, divisive and thus distracting spectacle.
In other words, the United States political classes will be too busy to formulate, let alone execute any new Russia policy. Furthermore, this risks leaving a poisonous legacy both for a post-Trump USA and within the wider Western alliance.
The Kremlin often gets Western countries and democratic politics very wrong. Betting on Trump’s ego, anger and capacity to disrupt, though, is not necessarily a long shot.