Mikhail Zygar is the author of All the Kremlin’s Men, a bestseller in Russia that was published in English this year. Zygar is the former editor-in-chief of TV Rain, the only independent Russian national television network, and a recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalist's 2014 International Press Freedom Award. This article was translated from Russian by Julia Ioffe.

With signs of Russian involvement in the damaging Democratic National Committee email hack, questions have been increasing about just what Putin’s motives might be when it comes to the US presidential election. We put that question to one of Moscow’s top Putin observers.

The year 2005 was a turning point in Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy and worldview. Until then, he’d had the sense that he was in control on the world stage, that he knew the rules of the game, that he understood whom he was dealing with and who his partners were. But in 2005, everything changed, and slowly the ground started moving out from under his feet.


That was the year Putin’s friend and partner Gerhard Schroeder lost the German elections and resigned as chancellor. Schroeder and Putin, who spoke German after serving in the KGB in East Germany, understood each other well and established close diplomatic and personal ties. But in 2005, Schroeder was replaced by Angela Merkel, whom Putin didn’t understand—and doesn’t understand to this day. In the intervening 12 years, he started suspecting Merkel of deceiving him, spinning intrigues and weaving conspiracies against him. He showed his distrust by bringing his dog to meetings with Merkel, knowing full well that she had an intense fear of canines.

Now, Putin seems to be experiencing déjà vu: In the upcoming U.S. election, the battle is, once again, between a Gerhard Schroeder and an Angela Merkel—but with the differences and the stakes hugely amplified. The American Merkel is even more unpleasant to Putin. Hillary Clinton is already inclined to dislike him and Russia from her experience as secretary of state. Their personal interactions have not been positive; there is no love lost between the two. And then you have the American Schroeder, who seems to be an even better fit for Putin than the German one, and better even than Putin’s favorite international partner, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Donald Trump, in the Kremlin’s view, is extremely pragmatic, extremely unprincipled and extremely cynical—which makes him easier to reach an understanding with. Not to mention that Trump, unlike Clinton and just about the entire rest of the Washington foreign policy class, has explicitly expressed admiration and sympathy for Putin.

This is the kind of relationship with a US president the Kremlin has dreamed about, and has been unable to attain, for years.

From the very beginning of his presidency, Putin has bet on personal relationships with world leaders as the basis for his foreign policy. It is almost as if he has tried to recruit all of them, trying to find each one’s personal key. He realized very quickly that all foreign leaders can be divided up into two important categories: those who believe in certain values (usually, democratic ones) and those who are totally cynical, concerned with self-advancement and power for its own sake. Sooner or later, attempts to build a relationship with leaders of the first category run aground on the rocks of mutual incomprehension. With leaders of the latter category, everything is on the table.

Putin formulated what he wants from the outside world at the very start of his presidency: respect for him and for Russia. When he spoke at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, he described in great detail what that should look like. There needed to be a new world order and a new global security arrangement in which Russia’s interests were taken into account. Later, for example in his speech last fall at the U.N. General Assembly, Putin was even more precise: He wants a new agreement, a Yalta 2.0. In 1944, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin gathered at Yalta to divide the world into spheres of influence. But in the 1990s, as the Cold War came to an end, those borders were washed away. Putin now wants to draw them again, but more reliably, and to determine who are the new masters of the world and where the zones of each of their interests are. He wants the West to recognize that Russia isn’t just another country, but a power that can and should influence its closest neighbors without being condemned and punished.

Western leaders have told Putin many times that this is impossible: that the day of vast acknowledged “spheres of influence” is in the past, and that the globalized era just doesn’t have room for the antiquated approaches of the 19th or 20th centuries. Putin, however, doesn’t believe them. He thinks the new globalization is just a fig leaf for what’s really going on, which is that Western leaders want to divide up the world without him and leave Russia without a slice. Putin has always suspected that Western leaders are every bit as cynical as he is, and that all politicians are the same: they simply want more power, even if their efforts at attaining it might be veiled in terms like “democratizing” or “nation-building.”

Putin is not alone in this view. He has kindred spirits: Schroeder and Berlusconi, as well as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. They have always shared his approach. They never made themselves out to be saints. They didn’t pretend to care more about human rights than about business or power. They are the cynics who aren’t embarrassed by their cynicism and even openly acknowledge it.

But the other category of leader, to Putin’s mind, is far worse: They hide their true motivations, but deep down are just as cynical. Merkel and Barack Obama belong to the second category, in his view, and nothing will convince Putin otherwise.

All of Russia’s recent propaganda—TV, the rest of the press, and think tanks—has been built on this premise. Russian television doesn’t suggest that Russian leaders are any better or less corrupt, or more honest and just, than Western leaders. Rather, it says that everything is the same everywhere. All the world’s politicians are corrupt—just look at the revelations in the Panama Papers. Everywhere, human rights are being violated—just look at what American cops do to black people. All athletes dope. All elections are falsified. Democracy doesn’t exist anywhere, so give it up. Putin watches Russian television, and over and over again it reassures him that he’s right. Its message perfectly matches what he thinks of the world. (There are also several American television shows that have made a big impression on Putin. He has watched House of Cards and Boss, and came away convinced that American politicians really are frauds. On TV at least, the president of the United States can kill someone, even several people, with his own hands, and then mouth platitudes about democracy and justice.)

Trump fits perfectly into that worldview. He’s a cynic who doesn’t appear to care about international moral issues like human rights. He’s a populist who doesn’t pretend to be a saint. He’s a normal businessman with whom you can always cut a deal—as he has said himself many, many times. And if necessary, as Putin seems to believe, one could figure out how to carve up the world with Trump. At least he won’t lie to you and fill your ears with nonsense about democratic values.

The point isn’t about whether any hypothetical financial ties between Trump and Russian businesses actually exist. A source close to Putin’s administration assures me there are no serious ties, for what it’s worth. That’s not to say they can’t crop up in the future, but even if Trump shied away from such opportunities, that wouldn’t be Putin’s main concern. As a former intelligence officer, he thinks of assets differently. “Putin never saddles his allies with responsibilities that might get in their way,” says one former Kremlin official. “That goes against the rules of recruiting someone. On the contrary, if the client is successful, he’ll show up and do everything that’s needed of him on his own.”

A year ago, when the U.S. presidential campaign was just getting started, one retired senior Kremlin official went to the United States to meet Jeb Bush. At that point, the Kremlin believed he was the favorite and the candidate most likely to win. When the calculus changed, people around Putin quickly reoriented themselves toward Trump. That doesn’t mean there have been any real negotiations between the two camps. For Putin, that isn’t necessary. Two cynics can always find a common tongue.