Putin Counted on Waning U.S. Interest in Ukraine. It Might Be a Winning Bet.

BERLIN — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy for defeating Ukraine can be summed up in one revealing moment in his February interview with former television host Tucker Carlson. Addressing the possibility of heightened U.S. involvement in Ukraine, the Russian leader asked Americans: “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

After several tumultuous weeks in U.S. politics, Putin appears closer than ever to getting the answer he seeks.

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President Joe Biden, Ukraine’s most important ally, is engulfed in the biggest political crisis of his tenure, with calls from fellow Democrats to withdraw from the presidential race. Former President Donald Trump, favored in the polls, has picked as his running mate one of the loudest critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine.

And at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, Trump renewed his pledge to end the fighting and channeled Putin in warning of “World War III.”

All told, the arc of U.S. foreign policy could be moving closer to Putin’s expectations of it: an inward-looking worldview that cares far less about Ukraine than Russians do, making it only a matter of time until Washington abandons Ukraine like its critics say Afghanistan was abandoned in 2021.

In Moscow, analysts are poring over American polls and news reports, while state television and pro-Kremlin blogs have featured extensive coverage of Trump’s pick of Sen. JD Vance as his vice-presidential candidate. Dmitry Trenin, the former head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said his conclusion from the polling is that “all foreign problems” are low on the priority list for American voters.

“Putin’s strategic calculus is built on this: at some point, Americans will get tired,” said Trenin, who now teaches at a Moscow university and described Russia’s war aims as “completely appropriate.”

Polls show that while most Americans favor maintaining or increasing support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, they do not see it as a key electoral issue.

While 50% of American adults told the Pew Research Center in April that limiting Russian influence should be a top foreign policy priority, only 23% said the same of support for Ukraine. And when YouGov surveyed Americans in June on 28 policies proposed by Biden, the least popular one — with 30% backing — was “pledging 10 years of U.S. military support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.”

Putin, on the other hand, claims he is pursuing historical justice: Ukraine is a rightful part of Russia, he has said, describing his invasion as part of an existential conflict with the West.

He has shaped his foreign policy for years around the idea that the United States is led by a virulently anti-Russian elite pursuing world hegemony rather than the best interests of the American public — and that Russia can outlast that elite.

The stakes in that bet have never been as high as they are now, with Putin accepting enormous costs in lives and treasure to wage his third year of war in Ukraine. Analysts believe that Putin expects that eventually, the American-led West will stop arming Ukraine and push its leaders into an armistice on Russia’s terms.

“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt,” Putin told Carlson in February. “Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia?”

That Putin chose Carlson for his first interview with an American news outlet since 2021 was in itself revealing. A former Fox News host who often echoes Putin’s talking points on Ukraine, Carlson is a leading figure among Trump’s base, which Moscow views as potentially sympathetic.

In his speech to the Republican convention Thursday, Carlson said the U.S. military should be attacking drug supply routes into the United States rather than supporting Ukraine.

“You don’t see our commander in chief suggesting that we use our military to protect our country or the lives of its citizens,” Carlson said. “No, that’s for Ukraine.”

But it appears too soon for Putin to celebrate. His calculations about U.S. policies have repeatedly been proved wrong.

The Kremlin bet on helping elect Trump in 2016, only to see him ship weapons to Ukraine and tighten sanctions against Russia. In 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine, Russia was so caught off guard by the severity of the Western response that it didn’t have time to move hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian Central Bank reserves to safety. As a result, they were frozen in Europe and the United States.

Russian officials and Kremlin-linked commentators are now far more cautious than they were in 2016 in casting a potential Trump reelection as a win for Russia. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, told reporters Wednesday that “under Trump, there wasn’t much good being done for Russia.”

This time around, Putin has said he would prefer a victory for Biden, citing the president’s experience and predictable behavior. It was not clear the endorsement was genuine, given that support from Putin could damage a candidate’s standing among American voters.

“There were many hopes in the first term of the Trump presidency,” said Ivan Timofeev, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research group close to the Russian government. “But even back then, Trump wasn’t able to turn the relationship around.”

Timofeev was a bit player in that drama: his communications in 2016 about possible meetings between the Trump campaign and the Russian government were an early focus of the inquiry by Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who investigated Russian interference in the presidential election.

The Mueller inquiry was widely seen in Russia as evidence of an American “deep state” that would never accept a leader seeking to improve relations with Moscow, even if he had been elected after promising to do so. Trump made similar arguments.

The dire state of U.S.-Russia relations is immune to the political winds, Timofeev said. “The relationship is bad, and gradually getting worse,” he added. “I don’t see what can change the situation.”

Indeed, some Russians have noted that neither Ukraine nor Russia are coming up much in the U.S. presidential campaign these days. Vance, for all his criticism of Ukraine aid, did not mention the war in his prime-time speech Wednesday.

Trump, in his speech Thursday, offered no details about how he would end “the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine.” But he did say the globe was “teetering on the edge of World War III,” echoing Putin’s warnings that the Ukraine war was spiraling into a military conflict between Russia and NATO.

In Russia, many say that Americans are paying insufficient attention to those warnings.

“They’re talking about Russia in America far less than they do in Russia about America,” said Ekaterina Moore, a Russian American commentator based in Washington. “And in Russia, they would of course really like Russia to be more interesting to America.”

Moore has been getting up at 3 or 4 a.m. on many recent mornings to appear on talk shows on Russian state television as an analyst of U.S. politics.

On those shows, the many challenges facing Russia — an overheated economy, the staggering war casualties and a system in which power is concentrated in the hands of one man — are elided. Instead, they focus at length on an American political system that both hosts and guests describe as fickle and broken.

American politicians “don’t have the 20-year long view that Putin has,” Moore said. “He’s seen a lot.”

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