Attitudes toward President Donald Trump in Russia changed from euphoric support to utter disappointment in the space of the new U.S. president’s first 100 days in the White House. I do not remember any other instance in which Russian elites and the general public have experienced such an emotional overload in trying to determine their position about a foreign leader.

The relationship between the United States and Russia is like no other. It is heavily invested with both the gravest issues of international security and the most volatile political fancy.

The reasons for the misunderstanding lie deeper than immediate politics of the past months. The relationship between the United States and Russia is like no other. It is heavily invested with both the gravest issues of international security and the most volatile political fancy. As opposed to the U.S.-Chinese interdependent rapport, the U.S.-Russia story has almost no economic dimension. Therefore, it is not anchored in national vested interests and is open to exploitation for immediate political gain. This is why emotions can run high. The share of 

Russians polled by the All-Russia Center for Public Opinion

 who said they had a positive view of President Trump went from 38 percent to 13 percent immediately after the U.S. military strikes in Syria on April 6. The number of Russians who had a negative opinion of Trump went up from 7 percent to 39 percent on the same date.

almost half of those polled expected the U.S.-Russian relationship to improve

 after a Trump win. Only 34 percent thought so recently, and 

82 percent said that the relations were “negative.”

 To understand these wild swings, one has to go back to the roots of U.S.-Russian relations.

In my secondary school years in the late 1980s, “Deployment of New Missiles in Europe Must Stop,” “Moscow Pulls Out of the U.S. Olympics,” and “Reagan’s Great Lie in the Sky” were the kinds of news stories one had to present in front of the class after spending an evening sifting through the newspapers. We had weekly “political information” classes back then, and these headlines come back to me whenever I remember those times.

The acrimony of Soviet television and newspapers was so habitual that it did not strike one as truly biting. It was just the way the world was: they called us “evil,” we called them “imperialists”; they were running their part of the world, we were ruling ours. Underlying all the media noise was a notion firmly held by both sides that they were equals, each power holding a 50 percent stake in the world’s ultimate security "joint venture." The Soviet bloc and other socialist-leaning countries were not called “the second world” for nothing.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia sought to consolidate its former international status. Moscow made sure the Soviet nuclear arsenal was on Russian territory, took up responsibility for the Union’s debts, inherited its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and claimed the former republics’ largest foreign assets. By virtue of this transition, the Russian elites have always considered themselves entitled to the Soviet Union’s stature in the world.

Americans thought otherwise. U.S. politicians — starting with 

George H.W. Bush, who in 1992 declared that “the Cold War didn’t end; it was won”

 — tended to see Russia’s stake in the world as diminished. Of course, this was a viewpoint, not a document: the standoff between the powers of the capitalist West and the socialist East had been very real, but no capitulation treaty was signed at the end of the Cold War because the war, itself, had never been formally declared. The same goes for the Soviet-American security “joint venture”: it had never been instituted on paper and could be easily diluted.

Or so it feels now. “The collapse of the Soviet Union was unique in the pace with which the country’s international status crumbled,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of the journal 

 at the end of January, not long after President Trump’s inauguration. “In November 1991, the USSR was one of the two pillars of the world order. (Mikhail Gorbachev served as one of the two principals, with Bush, of the 1991 Madrid Conference, an attempt to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.) In December of the same year, the newly independent Russia was receiving humanitarian aid from its former adversaries — no military defeat suffered!”

This is today’s vision. I am not sure that many, even among the top officials, felt so strongly about the loss of Russia’s international status back in the 1990s. The overwhelming concern was to make sure the transition was peaceful. “The Soviet Union had more than five million soldiers deployed from Budapest to Vladivostok, and hundreds of thousands more troops in KGB and interior ministry battalions,” the historian Stephen Kotkin wrote in his aptly named book, 

. “It experienced almost no major mutinies in any of these forces. And yet, they were never fully used.”

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and a breakneck privatization of the assets created by generations of Soviet engineers, workers, and prisoners was the opportunity of a century. The people who understood this were very much interested in keeping the peace.

The transition was peaceful for a reason. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and a breakneck privatization of the assets created by generations of Soviet engineers, workers, and prisoners was the opportunity of a century. The people who understood this were very much interested in keeping the peace. The elites concentrated on their family’s economic survival or, if the opportunities presented themselves, future prosperity. Taking care of the former Soviet Union’s stake in the global security architecture was not Moscow’s priority at the time. It is for future historians to establish, but my take is that the trade-off between the great-power status, on the one hand, and the prosperity of the chosen few, on the other, was quite conscious. Today’s narrative of a great nation robbed of its former glory was not there yet.

President Vladimir Putin and his circle watched their peers enriching themselves up close. It was a 

Darwinian struggle of the fittest just to stay in one piece

 and siphon off the proceeds. Putin and his friends may have hated what they saw, but they were no opponents of the policies of Russia’s then-President Boris Yeltsin, either. Meanwhile, the second half of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s saw a major expansion of the American-backed institutions of the West: NATO and the European Union. Moscow never loved this expansion, but also never protested forcefully against it until a certain point. As late as the early 2010s, the working plan that Moscow seemed to be following was for Russia to be part of a Greater West, a loose community of nations that were too divergent economically and politically to fit the European Union, NATO, or even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but were still parts of a value-based whole.

It was because of this understanding that Moscow tolerated the expansion of the West: it was thinking of itself as an aspiring part of the West, too.

When it became obvious that this plan had not worked out, nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s status as an equal to the United States went into full blossom. The story of a great power deceived by its scheming partners became one of the dominant narratives developed by Russia’s state-run media.

“We all had illusions. We thought that — even after Russia, voluntarily and consciously, undertook absolutely historical limitations to its territory and manufacturing capacity,” 

Vladimir Putin said in a documentary released in 2015

. “As the ideological component was gone, we were hoping that ‘freedom will greet us at the door and brothers will hand us our sword.’” These words — a quote from Alexander Pushkin — are remarkable not just because of a reference to a Russian Romantic poem and a sword, but also because of the conditional character Putin ascribes to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Following the 2011–12 protests, Moscow reconceptualized the so-called “color revolutions” as being not just hostile acts, but weapons of political warfare deployed against Russia.

Moscow’s sense of entitlement to great-power status began to grow exponentially. Following the 2011–12 protests, Moscow reconceptualized the so-called “color revolutions” as being 

not just hostile acts, but weapons of political warfare

 deployed against Russia. Under the circumstances, there was only one way that Russia’s leaders could read the events in Ukraine in early 2014, when then-President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country following mass protests: the Kremlin read it as a prelude to Western-led regime change in Moscow. As a response, Russia broke out of the post–Cold War security agreements and annexed a part of another post-Soviet state, the peninsula of Crimea, a region of Ukraine. The events that followed the annexation and the break-out of war in Ukraine — the expulsion of Russia from G8; the introduction of American and European sanctions; a steep economic decline, caused mainly by a coinciding oil plunge — put U.S.-Russian relations into a deep freeze. But Moscow never meant to reach a point of no return.

When acting aggressively, Russia was acting in the belief — a belief that Putin reiterated on many occasions — that the past show of weakness was the cause of Russia’s troubles and that the present show of strength would bring back what was lost. By its use of force in Ukraine and later in Syria, Moscow was seeking to reinforce its negotiating position for a reinvigorated international status. The Obama administration, in Moscow’s view, did not understand the proposition — and so, the thinking went, a new administration would. A new president in Washington was Russia’s hope for a turnaround in an argument that had been left unresolved for the two-and-a-half post–Cold War decades.

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, Russia’s government-owned television channel that broadcasts in foreign languages, welcomed the Trump win on election night and immediately suggested that she would retire as soon as “Trump recognizes Crimea as part of Russia, strikes a deal with us on Syria, and frees Julian Assange.” This was the list of immediate political talking points that Moscow wanted to address when Trump was elected. Of course, Margarita Simonyan did not have to retire. It quickly became clear that those wishes would not be granted fast. But the real expectations were that the new administration would sit down with Moscow and make good on a debt that, Moscow thought, Washington owed it.

A country cannot trick others into recognizing its worth.

We still do not have the full picture of Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election, but the Kremlin was invested in it in the sense that it did expect a lot from the outcome. We do not know all the tools that may have been used; even if we learn more about them, this information will be technical. The nontechnical and fundamental part is that Moscow developed a sense of entitlement to a better representation in the world and tried to push for this entitlement to be recognized in Washington. I would not be surprised if Moscow did use some old tricks in trying to help the new administration move in the desired direction. What still surprises me is the kind of approach that Moscow has taken if, indeed, the idea was to get back to a conversation about Russia’s desired role in the world. A country cannot trick others into recognizing its worth.

The two sides’ divergent perspectives on Russia’s standing in the world originate at the very beginning of a long drama that is the U.S.-Russia post–Cold War relationship. The notion of Russia's being a major stakeholder in the world persisted on the Russian side and disappeared on the American side. For a long time, Russian society did not care about its loss of status, but it was reminded of such problems relatively recently by the state-run media, and only because of some profound disappointments the Russian elites had experienced over the past decade or so.

For the elites, it turned out that being personally rich was not enough, and the riches themselves were transitory given the precarious state of a barely modernized, heavily oil-dependent economy devoid of any consistent rules, let alone the rule of law. It is a society that must feel strong, not just its elites. Even if the Kremlin rulers sincerely believed that the West had tricked Russia out of the status it truly deserved, it should have recognized that pure deception is never enough: one needs substance to show for it.

The Russian economy and trade were to be the Kremlin’s main concerns if it wanted Russia to be recognized again as a major world power. To secure that recognition, the Kremlin would better engage in a relationship with the U.S. that would be beneficial to Russia’s businesses and scientific and scholarly communities — on top of the security agenda that will remain a U.S-Russia subject, no matter what.

is a Senior Fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute and the Editor-at-Large of Vedomosti, an independent Russian daily.

Cover photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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President Trump's early popularity in Russia owed much to the Kremlin’s concerns about its own standing in the world.

The Entitled: Why the Kremlin Had Such Big Expectations for a Trump Presidency 

With Russia’s unpredictable leadership, one thing is certain: It will continue to tighten its grip on its own people and fight its neighbors. Russia’s conflicts and wars are getting bloodier, and more people are being targeted for their political or anti-war views. The authorities are increasingly brazen in resorting to violence and expanding their discretion when applying restrictive legislation against malcontents. Political murders—including those of Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and Alexei Navalny—punctuate Vladimir Putin’s rule. Crucially however, these cases are rare—intended to be widely discussed and widely understood to carry political messaging without explicitly saying so.

Today’s Russian authorities—as opposed to their Soviet counterparts—never admit to punishing their political opponents, and publicly maintain that all citizens are entitled to all the rights and freedoms of a democracy.

The Kremlin does not need many high-profile deaths, arrests, and trials—it needs consistent escalation. Between 2012 and 2023, Russia’s human rights advocates noted the number of people facing charges associated with political dissent has steadily increased. According to OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors repression in Russia, the number of people involved in politically motivated criminal cases 

 from 84 in 2012 to 628 at its peak in 2022. That sharp increase in prosecutions was the government’s response to Russian society’s restrained antiwar protests in the immediate aftermath of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The number of these types of cases reverted to pre-war levels in 2023.

The Kremlin knows its audience well: Decades of government-sanctioned violence has taught people to “read” the language of intimidation. This is the essence of the Kremlin’s repression mechanism.

There is an important caveat: To understand the full scope of Russia’s repression, one must understand the sort of charges that are typically brought against the Kremlin’s political opponents. Today’s Russian authorities—as opposed to their Soviet counterparts—never admit to punishing their political opponents, and publicly maintain that all citizens are entitled to all the rights and freedoms of a democracy.

However, Moscow’s rulers today engage in full-scale law misapplication and abuse to achieve plausible deniability of their flagrant human rights violations. Russia’s legal regime is designed to enable Putin to claim he is fighting terrorism, extremism, and corruption—not political dissent. Charges of hooliganism or vandalism are often brought against ordinary protesters. Charges of 

” are commonly applied against organizers. Other criminal code charges include “

calls for imposing foreign sanctions against Russian citizens

public dissemination of false information about the use of the Russian armed forces

.” Not all these would be acceptable in a modern democracy, but to an uninitiated observer they may sound legitimate.

The description of extremism in Russian law is so vague that authorities have ample discretion to bring indiscriminate charges against anyone who may or may not be a threat. Now, to transfer a small donation to an organization that has been designated as “extremist” or to favorably mention such an organization online is enough to be accused of extremism. Case in point, the late Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF). According to the Russian independent media platform 

Russian for cold), 53 criminal cases were brought against the ACF and individuals connected with it.

Navalny’s senior-level allies have left Russia, but the authorities are looking for his former colleagues, temporary campaign volunteers, those who financially supported the foundation, and those who simply mentioned Navalny on social media.

The Kremlin knows its audience well: Decades of government-sanctioned violence has taught people to 'read' the language of intimidation. 

“Despite the fact that the original Russian ACF was disbanded back in 2021 (it continues operations abroad), the Russian authorities keep fabricating criminal charges against it and individuals tied to it,” 

. “Human rights activists believe that thousands of Russians are at risk.”

Putin’s Repression Reaches Late USSR Levels

Soviet authorities were more honest about their repression than their 21st century successors. They were open about their ideological agenda and used articles in their criminal code that specifically targeted political dissent. In the post-Stalin Soviet Union, those formulations were “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” or spreading “deliberately false fabrications defaming the Soviet state and social order.” In early post-Soviet Russia, those convicted on such grounds were 

 politically motivated prosecutions under “extremism,” “spreading false information,” and related charges. Journalists identified at least 4,667 such cases between 2018 and 2023, during Putin’s second presidential term. More than 5,600 people were defendants in these cases.

The tactic of charging opponents with economic rather than political crimes aims to prevent dissenters from holding a moral high ground in their interactions with the state. 

“Some have already been convicted, some are waiting for their fate. But it is unlikely that the latter will be able to avoid a guilty verdict, because the number of acquittals in Russia is much less than 1%,” 

investigators compared these numbers to the 

 collected by the Russian State Archives for the periods when the communist rulers Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were in power (1953-1964 and 1964-1982 respectively). Diverging legal regimes and historical circumstances make direct comparisons between different historical periods tricky. The Soviet Union’s population was almost twice the size of today’s Russia. Given these adjustments, the level of political persecution during Putin’s first term alone (5,613 cases) is comparable to that under Khrushchev and early Brezhnev combined (5,899 from 1956 to 1967) and the number of political prosecutions plummeted during the late Brezhnev era.

These numbers are not exhaustive. The real level of persecution cannot be defined in exact terms because the charges used for political reasons include white-collar crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, and abuse of office. 

 brought against Alexei Navalny, widely considered fabricated, focused on embezzlement. In the late 2000s, Navalny briefly served as a volunteer adviser to a governor of the Kirov province. This was the reason the authorities could tie his acquaintance’s business dealings to his “official” decisions.

The Kremlin’s disguised repression presents a problem even today—especially for those who leave Russia and seek employment or other opportunities in the West.

“Had he not later been prosecuted for extremism, he would not have been included in our statistics,” writes the authors of the 

. “Politically motivated cases under economic articles were not included in this investigation.”

The tactic of charging opponents with economic rather than political crimes aims to prevent dissenters from holding a moral high ground in their interactions with the state. When high-ranking officials or top managers of state-controlled corporations expose the regime’s corruption and violence, accusations of white-collar crimes are the measure of first resort for authorities. The response from the Kremlin and its propagandists would be something along the lines of: “Who is this person to speak? He is a fraud, a crook, a thief.”

This and numerous other cases of misapplying the law would present a major problem during potential future rehabilitation processes. Even though those familiar with how the Russian state deals with dissent understand the process of disguised repression, hundreds (or possibly thousands) of people will have the burden of proving to lawyers and judges that their criminal convictions were politically motivated. Even if a new government claims to break with Putin’s past, genuine change is unlikely unless they reform the country’s bureaucratic and security apparatus and hire new officials.

The Kremlin’s disguised repression presents a problem even today—especially for those who leave Russia and seek employment or other opportunities in the West. These people are often seen as tainted by Russia’s barbaric war against Ukraine and Moscow’s aggressive policies. This is exactly what Putin wants: to have most Russians implicated in the crimes of their leaders. Western migration policies help him succeed; thousands of Russians must clear their names to potential employers and colleagues. People need to provide proof that their criminal convictions were politically motivated. Some members of the LGBTQ+ community, all of whom face persecution in Russia, are refused refugee status or must wait for years; some 

Welcoming Russians to Western societies is not charity. Given Russia’s internal restrictions and Western visa requirements, only those with enough skills, adaptability, and some means 

 the country. Many are among the most in-demand and adaptable professionals: IT specialists, engineers, researchers; they are scientists, scholars, and teachers. Of course, it is every individual Russian migrant’s responsibility to provide proof of their clear stance on Russia’s aggression. It is important though that their hosting communities are prepared to listen.

Maxim Trudolyubov is a senior fellow at the Kennan Institute and the Editor-at-Large of Meduza

between 2003 and 2015 and has been a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times International Edition

blog for the Kennan Institute and oversees special publications.

Cover photo: Flowers and candles laid at a spontaneous memorial for Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a remote penal colony in Kharp. February 19 2024, Vilnius, Lithuania. Shutterstock/

Russia’s conflicts and wars are getting bloodier, and more people are being targeted for their political or antiwar views. In this piece, Max Trudolyubov explores the Kremlin’s strategic use of political repression, which often includes misapplication and manipulation of the law.  

The Kremlin has built a system of targeted violence and calculated repression that is political in nature—but is never recognized that way—bringing with it lasting implications.