Clinton’s support for the demonstrations hardly constituted a threat to Putin’s return to the Kremlin. But it seems he saw it that way. This conspiracy theory was typical of a worldview forged during his years at the KGB working chiefly in counterespionage—less a spy, and more spy-catcher, a profession that not only generates paranoia but also, to a degree, demands it. Aside from his anyone-but-Clinton mindset, Putin had additional reasons to boost her opponent: Candidate Trump’s admiration for Putin; his declared preference for nationalism over globalism; his apparent intention to revert to a world order based on great-power spheres of influence; his skepticism toward the European Union (he has urged members to follow Britain to the exit); and his denigration of NATO as “obsolete.”

Those last sentiments have been especially unsettling. Nothing would please Putin more than for the 45th president of the United States to weaken the political West’s two bedrock institutions—or, better yet, to allow them to be dismantled, altogether. During Trump’s campaign and transition, Putin must have been delighted to hear him repudiate the values and strategy of Atlanticism that guided his 12 predecessors—six Democrats and six Republicans—stretching back 70 years to Harry Truman. The dissolution of the political West would be delicious payback for what, in Putin’s eyes, was a Western plot to tear the Soviet state asunder.

This theme in Putin’s narrative of grievance against North America and Western Europe is a bizarre case of cognitive dissonance: His rise would have been impossible if not for the patronage and promotions of Boris Yeltsin, who, in 1991 and 1992, was the principal instigator of the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.

Yet Putin has managed to rewrite history for much of Russia’s citizenry and for himself, in order to justify a revanchist foreign policy. Therefore, he had every reason to cast his own vote in the U.S. election and, on November 8, celebrate the result. U.S. intercepts of Russian communications indicate that top officials in Moscow did not wait until Chekist’s day to pop the champagne bottles when they heard the final returns. They toasted Trump’s victory—and their own.

The vast damage to American interests wrought by Putin is likely to deepen for years to come. It is bad for Trump, since the ongoing revelations of a foreign adversary’s contamination of an American election undermines the outcome’s validity. This would be the case however Trump handled the matter, but he has exacerbated the qualms and controversy. His fury over leaks from U.S. intelligence agencies and investigative stories by the mainstream American media created the impression that he is shooting the messengers in order to divert attention from the core message that Russia successfully attacked America’s democracy, tarnished its reputation worldwide, and cast a pall over its president’s legitimacy. Trump has seemed more outraged at his own government than Putin’s, rousing public anger from two former CIA directors. During the campaign, Mike Morrell, former acting director of the CIA under Obama, called Trump Russia’s “unwitting agent.” Michael Hayden, who led the agency under George W. Bush, chimed in, scorning Trump as Moscow’s “useful fool.”