Because with Trump, Putin suddenly has a counterpart who wants to negotiate. This ends his narrative that he did not start this invasion, but that the West is waging war against Russia. If Trump sits down at the negotiating table, he forces Volodymyr Zelenskiy to do so, Putin will be under massive pressure – because he doesn’t actually want to negotiate at all at the moment, things are going far too well on the front for that.
In addition, Trump’s General Keith Kellogg did not nominate a Putin admirer as Ukraine envoy. On the contrary: Kellogg immediately backed Biden’s yes to the use of US long-range weapons, and he put impressive leverage on the table. If Moscow refuses to negotiate, Ukraine will be armed with more weapons than Biden’s government did, he said.
Putin probably knew that something like this threatened him. There are some in Trump’s cabinet that Russia has been loudly pleased about; his secret service coordinator Tulsi Gabbard, for example, who spread Putin’s conspiracy theory about US bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine on social media. In their usual sexist manner, the Russian media called her a “bold brunette beauty” that Putin should be happy about. They had less nice things to write about his designated Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after all, he had already publicly called Putin a “villain”; and Putin’s propagandists also saw Trump’s security advisor Michael Waltz as a threat to the Kremlin – which once described Russia as a “gas station with nuclear weapons”.
Many experts see the fact that Putin has been bombing Ukraine more intensively since election day than ever before since the start of the war as a response to Trump. The fact that Russia is increasingly involving North Korea in the war and is now hunting mercenaries for Ukraine in Yemen is also seen as a declaration of war.
The Villain Contest
But some observers see another reason for Putin to worry. For two years, Putin has been trying to forge a global alliance against the USA, acting as a “leader and selfless defender” of an alleged majority that no longer wants to be under the thumb of the USA. This is now massively undermining Trump, writes Alexander Baunow, Russia expert at the Carnegie think tank: Under him, the USA will retreat as a global hegemon; and American economic pressure on China could lead Beijing to slowly abandon Russia.
There is also a fear that even Putin’s propagandists are now expressing on TV: Trump could overtake the Kremlin boss’s rank as the self-proclaimed leader of a conservative, anti-liberal movement – he could replace him as a heroic figure among Europe’s right. “Putin’s traditionalist and homophobic agenda is less attractive to the Western right than Trump’s aggressive, unfiltered anti-immigration rhetoric,” Baunow said.
That makes Putin look weak – and that’s something the Kremlin boss has never liked.