Trump confronts surprising pushback from Moscow officials

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are famously chummy, but a recent report reveals that Putin’s fondness for Trump has not trickled down to the rest of the Russian population — including many of Putin’s own supporters.

“When President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, some Russian hardliners were cautiously optimistic, hoping his unpredictability and transactional nature might benefit Moscow on Ukraine,” Reuters reported. “But his attack on Iran means many now see him as a growing threat to Russia itself and are questioning if Trump is the pragmatic, potentially pro-Moscow strongman ready to deal in realpolitik that they thought he was.”

For this reason, many Putin supporters in Russia want their president to walk away from the Trump-mediated peace talks with Ukraine and ramp up their military activities instead. They fear that Trump cannot be trusted after his invasion of Iran, which he acknowledges is being spearheaded by their alliance with Israel.

"The unprincipled United States is a threat to the entire world," nationalist tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev, the husband of a top Kremlin official, told the wire service. "This is the United States we are trying to negotiate with regarding Ukraine. Yes, it wants a weak Europe. But it also wants a weak Russia."

Boris Rozhin, an influential war blogger who goes by the moniker, "Colonel Cassad" and has nearly 800,000 followers on the Telegram app, said Trump was a monster, driven mad by impunity.

"To seriously count on any agreements or deals with it (the monster) is either foolishness or treason," opined Rozhin.

Andrei Sidorov, a prominent academic, argued to state TV that Trump is "a dangerous man" who is “in charge of the world” and should not be trusted for that reason.

"If you look at what Trump is doing now, step-by-step, practically nobody is able to stop him,” Sidorov said. “Let's be honest - Russia is bogged down in Ukraine. Practically all we do now is deal with the Ukrainian question. (And) our main adversary (the U.S.) is acting as an intermediary in those negotiations."

Putin, by contrast, has avoided personally attacking Trump with the same vigor as many of his own supporters. Although the Kremlin described Trump’s invasion of Iran as an “unprovoked aggression,” they have refrained from criticizing Trump publicly. Even before Trump invaded Iran, Putin had started to realize the weakness of his position — and how much he therefore depends on Trump.

In an article published by The Atlantic on February 13, Thomas Graham (a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations) and Alan Cullison (a former Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal)

"For decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against the world that the United States built after the Cold War," wrote the Council on Foreign Relations's Thomas Graham and the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Cullison Cullison for The Atlantic last month. "In his account, an international order run by a single power would hinder Russia and produce needless conflict, especially when that power was as self-serving and duplicitous as America. Now, Donald Trump is dismantling the order that Putin had so long abhorred, and a new multipolar world is emerging in its place. Putin had thought he could rise to the top of such a system, in which raw economic and military might outweigh diplomacy and alliances. But he was mistaken: The norms and institutions of the post-War order actually masked Russia's vulnerabilities. Putin has gotten the world he wished for — and it's threatening to crush him."

For this reason, Putin depends on friendly relations with Trump in lieu of other strategically powerful partnerships. As Graham and Cullison wrote, Putin’s "touted a wide-ranging strategic partnership with China" has "fallen short of his expectations."

In an interview with the UK-based iPaper published on New Year's Day 2026, former CIA Russia expert and strategist Rob Dannenberg argued Putin views Trump as an easy mark.

"Those of us who served in Moscow understood Putin maybe a little bit better early on than others did…. I dealt with the KGB my entire life. I understand how this guy thinks,” Dannenberg said. He argued that Putin knows how to exploit Trump’s ego and that the president is "incredibly naïve" when it comes to the Russian despot.

"Putin looks at Trump and sees a weak guy, vain, with huge ego,” Dannenberg said. “He's being manipulated in the way that a good case officer like Putin would manipulate this guy. He's not monogamous, he's greedy, he's fascinated by gold — all these are things that, if I were a case officer, I would be leveraging to get this guy to do what I want him to do. When that happens to align with Trump's ambition to get a Nobel Peace Prize, so much the easier, right? You're pushing on an open door."

Speaking to this author for Salon in 2018, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul argued that Trump — who had recently offered to turn McFaul over to Putin because of the Russian president’s dislike of McFaul’s criticisms — fails to morally distinguish between the US and Russia.

“I was deeply disappointed,” McFaul told Salon at the time. “The generous interpretation,” he continued, is that Trump “didn’t understand what he was talking about. But let’s be clear: What Trump was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin. To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America’s national interest, from my point of view.”

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