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Sergey Markov, a pro-Putin foreign policy ideologist, wrote on Facebook:

It was the silent moral majority that voted for Trump, that which lives in small towns, has moderately conservatively views, believes in God, in family, in morals, that which wants to do honest work rather than steal or live on government assistance. That is Vladimir Putin’s base, too. Both Putin and Trump think like businessmen and prefer a contract to a conflict. Both have said good things about each other. This creates a good foundation for a good relationship between the Russian and U.S. presidents and for an overall improvement in relations.

Putin himself was among the first to congratulate Trump on the win. That’s clearly the way to win the U.S. president elect’s favour. After he won, Trump first talked to those foreign leaders who hadn’t voiced opposition to him. The first one he spoke with was Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had been the first to congratulate him. He took inordinately long to get to U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May — probably not because Brexit has diminished her country’s significance but because she had called him “divisive, unhelpful and wrong.” Trump made it clear during the campaign that he was taking things personal, and he was unapologetic about it. Putin and his allies in Moscow got the message: It’s no skin off their backs to act happy about Trump’s election — something more principled leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel have not seen fit to do.

None of this, however, is an indication of euphoria. Putin has cautiously remarked that he’d “heard” Trump’s encouraging statements during the campaign — presumably meaning the Republican candidate’s promises of cooperation in Syria and a more hands-off approach to Ukraine — but “it will be a long path” toward a U.S.-Russian rapprochement, “considering the unfortunate degradation of relations.”

Slutsky of the Duma Foreign Relations Committee also urged caution. “Trump played to the audience,” he said in a TV interview. “Ronald Reagan also used to play to the audience, but he turned out to be the most anti-Russian of presidents.” And Sergei Kalashnikov, a member of the Russian parliament’s upper house, called Trump “a cowboy who expresses the interests of a conservative and rather aggressive part of U.S. society. “We bought into some of his overtures to Russia and mistakenly decided he’d be good for us,” Kalashnikov told the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency. “But any U.S. president is only good for the U.S.”