Anna Nemtsova is a correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast based in Moscow. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Policy, nbcnews.com, Al Jazeera, Marie Claire and the Guardian.

MOSCOW—In living rooms and kitchens across Russia and Ukraine, the U.S. presidential election is as riveting to TV viewers as “Game of Thrones” is to their American counterparts. Every time Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Crimea, Russian hackers or the Donbas (the disputed region of eastern Ukraine)—and it’s rebroadcast here, which it usually is—people in both countries sit up as if some crazy American reality show has just come on. Almost every day, television channels in both countries highlight America’s new scandals and intrigues involving Trump’s connections with post-Soviet oligarchs, or leaked DNC emails, or the endless hurling of insults and the constant debate over America’s supposedly disappearing greatness.

But the main reason the U.S. election has become must-see TV is not because it’s a great reality show, or because Putin and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine come up as issues in the campaign as often as Mexican immigrants, ISIS and Benghazi. It's because the political rhetoric across the Atlantic is actually starting to change facts on the ground in Russia and Ukraine. In both countries, coverage of the political chaos in the United States—the north star of politics for both anti-American and pro-American figures in this part of the world—is stirring public discontent and doubt about the future in Ukraine, and a sense of confidence, even arrogance, in Russia.


In short, the rhetoric in the U.S. election campaign—especially Trump’s—is already altering policy in the region, hardening Moscow’s attitude toward Ukraine and at the same time frustrating and confusing the Ukrainians who want to stand up to Putin. This is partly because the U.S. campaign is happening against the backdrop of rising tensions between Kiev and Moscow. Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko put his army on combat alert after Putin accused him of sending “saboteurs” into Crimea. State television showed footage of the Russians capturing the suspects under a full moon. Russian intelligence claimed that the Ukrainian military had killed a Russian officer and soldier. Kiev called the allegation “a fantasy.”

The political dynamics of U.S. involvement in the region are complex. Russians and Ukrainians know that these three countries, Russia, Ukraine and the United Sates, are roped together as futilely as Swan, Crawfish and Pike in the famous fable by Ivan Krylov, the Russian children’s author; each character tries to pull a cart each in his direction so in the end the cart does not move an inch. Russia wants Trump for U.S. president; Ukraine is terrified by Trump and prefers Hillary Clinton. Thus neither outcome resolves anything. “It’s amazing to see how Clinton and Trump, as two hateful dogs, pull the blanket in opposite ways,” Mikhail Stepanov, a taxi driver, summed it up for me.

And Putin is exploiting this sense of futility over the Clinton-Trump election to lay his plans for future control of Ukraine, according to Denis Volkov, a spokesman for pollster Levada. “In this dead-end situation, Putin is going to push his own agenda, using the moment when there is no real public interest in the Ukraine affair in the world,” Volkov said.

Many Ukrainians, torn by their own political scandals and conflicts, say they’re shaken by the level of discourse in the United States, whose democracy many Ukrainian revolutionaries once saw as their compass. The GOP nominee’s laissez-faire attitude toward Ukraine’s future is a particular contrast to the two previous Republican standard-bearers, Mitt Romney and John McCain, both of whom made strident statements in support of Ukraine’s independence and opposed Putin’s aggression. “Trump’s contradictory decisions and the illogical views of some of his supporters resemble a mirror of Russia,” Natalia Gumenyuk, head of a Ukrainian TV channel called Hromadske, told me. She added that the GOP candidate reminds her of the self-exiled former Ukrainian president and Putin puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, who, like Trump, often made incoherent speeches.

In Russia, meanwhile, everything is reported through a pro-Trump lens. On Aug. 14, State Channel One broadcast video footage of burned remains of Syrian children in Aleppo province, saying they’d been killed by U.S. forces (though Russian planes have been flying in the region as well), then segued directly to the U.S. election and Hillary Clinton’s supposed violation of democratic principles as revealed in the leaked DNC emails. The show aired part of a CNN interview with Clinton in which she asserts that Russian intelligence and the Russian government were behind the leak. “Here we go, they primarily like to say ‘we know,’” the Russian presenter said sarcastically. She then added that “the scandal around the fraud of Democrat emails increased popularity for Donald Trump, who promised to improve the relations with Russia.”

Every new Trump attack on President Barack Obama or Clinton is also regularly broadcast, as if the state media wants to say, “See, did we not tell you exactly that for years?” Trump’s latest attack line—that Obama created ISIS—is especially popular in Putin’s Russia, where the state-controlled media would have you believe that Russia’s brave leader is alone in fighting malign forces in Syria. Earlier this month, a young presenter wearing hip glasses appeared on NTV, one of the most popular Russian channels, to inform millions of Russians that Trump accused Obama of creating the Islamic State. According to this summer’s social polls, up to 72 percent of Russians already considered Washington their greatest enemy, but the mainstream media has continued to demonize the United States by deploying Trump’s rhetoric against the U.S. president.

The devout Russian recitation of Trump’s attacks on Obama and Clinton has reached such a pitch that recently on the nation’s premier Sunday talk show, “News of the Week,” the topic was, surprisingly, whether all this criticism of the current American president was over the top. The show’s presenter, Yevgeny Popov, counted the number of times Trump called Obama and Clinton “creator” and “co-creator” of the Islamic State and asked whether crudeness has become a norm in American politics. What, he asked, does that mean for the rest of the world? “What sort of decisions could such elites make, if stupidity and crudeness, scandals and hot air replace reasonable sense?” he said.

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Ukraine’s focus on the U.S. presidential election is a newer phenomenon. Today Trump is getting almost much free media there as he does in the United States. Tatiana Popova, an advisor to the minister of defense, told me that both Trump and Clinton were often featured on the most popular television channels--and many Ukrainian viewers were puzzled and angered by Trump’s recent statement that Putin would not make a military move into Ukraine under a Trump presidency, even though Russia had already annexed the country's Crimean Peninsula.

“They show us Trump as a big clown,” Boris Khodorkovsky, an Odessa television viewer, told me. “Of course Putin is not going to bring his army for a huge war, everybody knows that.” Still, Trump’s pro-Russian statements have clearly irritated Ukrainians, Khodorkovsky indicated. The Ukrainian TV channel Hromadske even published an infographic titled “Donald Trump’s Connections with Russia,” showing a well-composed web of relationships between Trump and his team members and the Russian and Ukrainian establishment. Hromadske reported that Trump’s own business ties with Moscow began in 1996 when he registered five "Trump" trade brands. Hromadske also put together a chronology of Trump’s real estate deals with super rich Russians, including Aras Agalarov, one of Moscow’s billionaires. That added $20 million to Trump’s fortune, the Ukrainian channel reported.

What has fascinated Kiev observers as well is that even before Trump got involved in Russia, advisers Carter Page and Paul Manafort were already consulting and making business deals with Ukrainian and Russian billionaires. Even Michael T. Flynn, former director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and Trump's current national security adviser, found his way into one Ukrainian TV account for sitting at the same table with Putin at a “Russia Today” dinner last year.

Above all, Ukrainians are unnerved by the idea that a Putin ally such as Trump could occupy the most powerful office in the world. “Trump’s entire discourse—not just not challenging the Russian occupation of Crimea but isolationism, conspiracy theories, little respect for the law and the right to bully—it all looks exactly like what the Kremlin has been saying for years,” Gumenyuk told me.

If Hillary Clinton ultimately wins the election—as polls now suggest she will—then it’s entirely possible the strategic situation could return to the status quo ante. But judging from what the media in this part of the world are saying, the campaign rhetoric in America has complicated—for the worse—the already fraught relations between Russia and Ukraine.