On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news that, a month ago, U.S. government officials briefed Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign that the Kremlin was trying to aid his run for the White House. After the Post story, Sanders issued a strongly-worded statement, telling Vladimir Putin to “stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.”

The report didn’t specify what the Russians are doing to help, but if it’s true that they are, it would not be the first time they’ve sought to assist Sanders in his bid for the Democratic nomination. In 2016, Russian state media, which often serves as a barometer of Kremlin sentiment, strongly backed both Sanders and Donald Trump—while trashing Hillary Clinton, whom it cast as committed to starting a war with Russia. In July of that year, WikiLeaks and the GRU hacker Guccifer dumped some 20,000 internal emails from the Democratic National Committee. The correspondence, which we now know to have been pilfered by Russian intelligence agencies when they hacked the DNC’s servers, revealed that the Democratic Party was trying to thwart Sanders’s ascent in the 2016 primaries. The disclosure sowed chaos at the party’s convention and helped to disenchant many of Sanders’s supporters. This time around, it appears that Moscow is still focused on Sanders.

“This Russian support for Bernie is multifaceted, multilayered, and in line with the traditional active measures playbook,” says Marc Polymeropoulos, a recently retired CIA agent who, after the 2016 election, was tasked with pushing back on Russian covert operations around the world.

But why would Russia—which, according to American intelligence agencies, backed Trump in 2016 and is continuing to do so in 2020—also support Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist and seemingly Trump’s polar opposite?

Some observers point to Sanders’s foreign policy positions, like his commitment to non-interventionism, as being potentially beneficial to Moscow. After all, Russia, which loves intervening abroad, has a far easier time doing so when the U.S. withdraws from the world stage. Some cite representative Ro Khanna’s remarks at the recent Munich Security Forum, where Khanna, one of Sanders’s top surrogates, said that a President Sanders would keep Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics, from joining NATO. (Khanna later walked those comments back.) Others recall that Sanders voted against the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on Russians who had been suspected of violating the human rights of a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow jail under mysterious circumstances. Sanders wasn’t the only Democrat in the Senate to vote against the measure, and though Sanders never explained his nay vote, fellow Dems suggest that it was because a free trade provision had been tucked into the legislative package.

Of course, nuance like that rarely makes it across the eight time zones separating Washington from Moscow, where Sanders’s decision not to back the measure that infuriated the Kremlin caught the eye of the Russian government. The move earned Sanders a reputation as “a soft pro-Putinist,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a political scientist who used to advise Putin. “That kind of thing will never be forgotten” in Moscow, he added.

But to plenty of those watching the 2020 race from Moscow and wondering which candidate will be most advantageous to Russia, Bernie’s foreign policy positions really don’t matter much. Helping him earn the Democratic nomination is seen by many there as a way of supporting Trump. “If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, then Trump wins the White House,” predicts Igor Yurgens, president of the Institute of Contemporary Development, and a former advisor to erstwhile Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. “America won’t vote for such a leftie candidate. If you’re sitting in the [FSB headquarters at] Lubyanka and watching this race, you see that helping Sanders helps Trump. At least, that’s what I would do.”