The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help former President Donald Trump, a chain of events documented in detail by former special counsel Robert Mueller's report. Now, eight years later, Vladimir Putin and his strategists are just as eager for the former president to retake office in order to realize their geopolitical goals.
According to Vanity Fair, "From the moment Trump was elected, the word Yalta became one of the most popular among Kremlin officials" — a reference to how Joseph Stalin was able to convince his then-American and British allies in World War II to legitimize his sphere of influence. "They were confident that Trump was the right person to agree to such a spectacle. This did not mean that Russian authorities considered Trump 'their puppet' — the Kremlin never had any means to influence him. Putin simply believed that Trump was morally close and understandable to him: a fellow cynic who also thought that money solved everything."
This came after Putin had, according to Mikhail Zygar, believed former President George W. Bush was on his way to becoming a military dictator he could partner with, only for the American people to lose support for him and his party to be swept from power.
After this, he had endured years of a mistrustful relationship with former President Barack Obama, harboring paranoid suspicions that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton organized protests against Putin's own administration at home.
It was in this context that Putin tried to interfere to help Trump get elected, and believed that it would be easier to deal with him — in essence, wrote Zygar, "the fantasies of Kremlin strategists" involve Trump and Putin meeting somewhere neutral, like Fiji, and the two will carve up the world together and create a new order for each country.
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"While fantasizing about the future of the US under Trump, the Kremlin harbors another dream," wrote Zygar. "It sees it as the ultimate revenge for the Cold War defeat and the collapse of the USSR. Putin’s current advisers are confident that the US will eventually disintegrate, breaking into several pieces like the Soviet Union ultimately did. This would require the right conditions and a leader who could plunge the country into chaos. You might be surprised, but the nickname used for Trump in the Kremlin is the American Gorbachev" — for Putin, being a former KGB officer, sees Gorbachev as a "demagogue and a narcissist" whose empty pandering and lack of strategy caused the end of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, he added, Putin's inner circle gets much of their conception of how America works from Hollywood movies, believing that this year's dystopian sci-fi film Civil War is basically a prediction of the future.
"Just a little more, and Trump will agree to a new Yalta. And then the US will disintegrate, and Russia will win the new Cold War," wrote Zygar. "Vladimir Putin believes that his dream is not so unattainable."