America the evil mastermind? Not so fast, Russians are told

Five weeks ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a routine speech blasting the “hegemonic, egoistic” United States at the helm of the “collective West”. The worldview of the 74-year-old veteran diplomat has since undergone some head-spinning changes.

In an interview on Russian state television on Sunday, Lavrov listed the ills that Europe – not America – had brought upon the world. The US, in his telling, had gone from evil mastermind to innocent bystander.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Tuesday.Credit: AP

“Colonisation, wars, crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon, World War I, Hitler,” Lavrov said. “If we look at history in retrospect, the Americans did not play any instigating, let alone incendiary, role.”

As President Donald Trump turns decades of US foreign policy upside down, another dizzying swing is taking place in Russia, both in the Kremlin and on state-controlled television: The United States, the new message goes, is not that bad after all.

Almost overnight, it’s Europe – not the United States – that has become the source of instability in the Russian narrative. On his marquee weekly show on the Rossiya-1 channel on Sunday night, anchor Dmitri Kiselyov described the “party of war” in Europe as outmatched by the “great troika” of the United States, Russia and China that will form “the new structure of the world”.

For more than a decade, the US was the Kremlin propaganda machine’s main boogeyman – the “hegemon”, the “puppeteer” and the “master across the ocean”. It was seeking Russia’s destruction by pushing Europeans, Ukrainians and terrorists into conflict with Moscow.

Russians ride the subway in Moscow on Tuesday.Credit: AP

After Trump’s return to the White House, Russian officials first said not much would change.

“The difference, other than terminology, is small,” Lavrov said in that January 30 speech, comparing the Trump and Biden administrations.

But then came the phone call on February 12 between Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin, the talks between the White House and the Kremlin in Saudi Arabia, the vote at the United Nations in which America sided with Russia, and the berating of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office last week.

In a matter of weeks, it became clear that the second Trump presidency had the potential to deliver far more of a pro-Russian foreign policy than his first one did.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, US President Donald Trump and US Vice President J.D. Vance during their explosive meeting in the Oval Office.Credit: Bloomberg

Putin has led the shift in tone. The leader who used to castigate the US-led West for seeking to “dismember and plunder Russia” last week proposed the US mine Russian rare earth metals and help develop aluminium production in Siberia. It was part of Putin’s outreach to Trump as he dangled the potential for vast wealth from Russian resources.

On Friday, hours before Trump harangued Zelensky at the White House, Putin sounded his new, pro-American message in the unlikeliest of places: the annual meeting of Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, which has been at the vanguard of Moscow’s shadow war against the West.

Putin said talks with the Trump administration “inspire certain hopes”, praised it for its “pragmatism” and called on the spies in attendance to resist attempts “to disrupt or compromise the dialogue that has begun”.

The whiplash in ties with Washington was so stark that Russian state television on Sunday showed a reporter asking the Kremlin’s spokesperson how it was possible that “a couple of months ago we were publicly saying that we were almost enemies”.

The sunsets over the Kremlin in Moscow on February 24.Credit: AP

“This, indeed, couldn’t have been imagined,” the spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, replied, marvelling at the shift. US foreign policy, he added, now “coincides with our vision in many ways”.

The Kremlin’s message-makers are struggling to help Russians make sense of it all. Some commentators are dredging up historical precedent, going as far back as Catherine the Great’s refusal to help Britain put down the American Revolution. Others say it’s the American voter who changed.

“The American people got tired of global empire,” a state TV talk-show stalwart, filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov, explained last week.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in 2017. They’ve been in contact several times since Trump’s return to the White House.Credit: AP

In an interview with The New York Times, Yevgeny Popov – whose show, 60 Minutes, is the most popular daily political program on Russian state TV – insisted that talk of co-operating with the US was not extraordinary because American companies had done business in the Soviet Union even in the depths of the Cold War.

“These are quite natural processes happening here,” Popov said. “We want peaceful, constructive and pragmatic and, most importantly, equal relations with the US.”

Still, Popov pointed out that American weapons were killing Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s battlefields, and that he did not believe there could soon be a friendly relationship with a country whose “tanks were firing on our people”.

Some guests on his show have gone further. Alexei Zhuravlyov, a firebrand lawmaker known for threatening the US with nuclear annihilation, said on 60 Minutes last week that Russia could “make friends with America and rule the world”.

“Trump needs us,” Zhuravlyov said. “Do we need Trump? We do. Do our interests coincide? They do. Against whom? Against the European Union.”

Underlying Russia’s interest in rapprochement with the US are a grudging respect for the country and extensive personal ties, especially among the cultural and commercial elite. Ivan Kurilla, a scholar of US-Russia relations at Wellesley College, said Russian and Soviet rulers long saw the US as a nation worth emulating – whether in its economic prowess or its swagger on the world stage.

“This duality of the view of America – it’s been like this for a long time,” Kurilla, who was a professor at the European University at St Petersburg until last year, said.

Popov, who used to be a Russian state television correspondent in New York, ticked off some of the things he believed Russia and the US have in common: a strong executive, protectionist policies, large armies, market economies “plus or minus” and powerful law enforcement agencies.

“We both have a police state in the good sense of the word,” Popov said in a video call last week as he made his way through Moscow traffic. He concluded, addressing Americans: “If you want to understand what the Russians think, look in the mirror.”

Russia fires a rocket towards Ukrainian forces at an undisclosed location in Ukraine.Credit: Russian Defence Ministry Press Service/ AP

The sudden prospect of improved ties with the US cheered the Russian public, which pollsters say is increasingly eager for an end to the war in Ukraine and sees negotiations with Washington as a prerequisite.

The Levada Centre, an independent pollster based in Moscow, found in February that 75 per cent of Russians would support an immediate end to the war, the highest reading since 2023, and that 85 per cent approved of talks with the US. Hopes of sanctions relief and the return of American investment helped drive up the Russian stockmarket by as much as 10 per cent after the Trump-Putin call on February 12.

A Ukrainian soldier looks at the sky searching for Russian FPV drones.Credit: AP

To some of the most fervent supporters of Russia’s war, the embrace of Washington has smacked of betrayal, given that Putin has long described the invasion as a proxy war against US aggression. On the Telegram social messaging app, Russia’s pro-war bloggers expressed surprise over Putin’s proposal last week for co-operating with American companies to extract the country’s natural resources.

A nationalist Telegram blog with more than 1 million followers, Two Majors, wondered how talk of “the evil desire of the damned Yankees to steal Russia’s natural resources” had morphed into discussion of “mutually beneficial co-operation with American partners”.

But for Putin himself, there may be a wisp of internal consistency in the swing towards Washington. He has generally avoided labelling the US as a whole as Russia’s enemy.

Rather, Putin has said it is the Western “neoliberal elite” that tries to impose its “strange” values on the world and seeks Russia’s destruction, while depicting American conservatives as Russia’s friends. It’s a mirror image of the propaganda tropes of the Soviet Union, when American progressives were cast as Moscow’s allies.

“In the United States,” Putin said in 2022, “there’s a very strong part of the public who maintain traditional values, and they’re with us. We know about this.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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