ps88 For Putin, Trump’s Win Is a New Opening, and a Chance to Win the War

The Kremlin tried and failed for four years to turn President Donald J. Trump’s friendly rhetoric into friendly policy.

Now it has a second chance.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s U.S. election, Russian officials said they cared little about the outcome. American policy toward Russia had only hardened during Mr. Trump’s four years in office, they argued, citing sanctions and his delivery of weapons to Ukraine.

But after Mr. Trump’s victory, the mood began to shift. Some people close to the Kremlin sought to pave the way for rapprochement with Washington despite what many Russians see as an American proxy war against them in Ukraine.

“Trump and his team have a reputation of being very pragmatic,” Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. Mr. Trump’s return to the White House would be an opportunity, he added, to “look at things in a more problem-solving manner than was done by previous administrations.”

Mr. Dmitriev declined to comment on whether he had sent private messages this week to anyone on the Trump team. But he issued a public statement signaling that the Kremlin saw a second Trump presidency as a welcome change, and a new opening to form a bond with Mr. Trump — who has often praised Mr. Putin’s authoritarian leadership and avoided condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

After the “lies, incompetence and malice of the Biden administration,” Mr. Dmitriev said, there were now “new opportunities for resetting relations between Russia and the United States.”

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