By Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn
MOSCOW (Reuters) – New opportunities to reset relations between Moscow and Washington have opened up, the influential head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund said on Wednesday after Donald Trump declared victory in the U.S. presidential election.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the Soviet Union and the U.S. came close to nuclear war.
Both Russian and U.S. diplomats say relations between the world’s two largest nuclear powers have only been worse during the depths of the Cold War.
Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a senior figure in Russia’s political elite, said that Trump’s team had won the presidency and the Senate “despite a large-scale disinformation campaign directed against them”.
“Their convincing victory shows that ordinary Americans are tired of the unprecedented lies, incompetence, and malice of the Biden administration,” said Dmitriev, a former Goldman Sachs banker who has previously had contacts with the Trump team.
“This opens up new opportunities for resetting relations between Russia and the United States,” added Dmitriev, who has regularly met and offered advice to President Vladimir Putin.
Trump, a Republican, claimed victory in the 2024 presidential contest after Fox News projected that he had defeated Democrat Kamala Harris, which would cap a stunning political comeback four years after he left the White House.
In 2009, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a “reset” with Moscow, but due to an apparent translation error presented Moscow with a symbolic button labelled “overload” in Russian instead of “reset”.
Despite the “reset”, relations between President Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama soured.
WAR IN UKRAINE
Trump, 78, has repeatedly promised to swiftly end the war in Ukraine if elected, though he has not explained exactly how he would do that.
Putin has repeatedly said he is ready to talk about a possible end to the war, but that Russia’s territorial gains and claims must be accepted, something that is anathema to the Ukrainian leadership which has said it would amount to capitulation on their side.
Putin has also spoken of the need for Moscow to be given security guarantees.
Russian forces are advancing at the fastest pace in at least a year in Ukraine and control about one fifth of the country.
That includes Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014, about 80% of the Donbas – a coal-and-steel zone comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – and more than 70% of the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
Ahead of the U.S. election, Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin down had said it made no difference to Moscow who won the White House, though Kremlin-guided state media coverage showed a preference for Trump.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday that Trump’s win would probably be bad news for Ukraine, but that it was unclear how far Trump would be able to cut U.S. financing for the war.
“Trump has one useful quality for us: as a businessman to the core, he mortally dislikes spending money on various hangers–on and stupid hanger-on allies, on bad charity projects and on voracious international organisations,” Medvedev, a senior security official, posted on his official Telegram account.
He said that the Ukrainian authorities fell into the category of people Trump was likely to not want to spend too much money on and suggested the Ukrainian leadership would be doing what it could to console itself if it was confirmed he had won.
“The question is how much Trump will be forced to give to the war. He’s stubborn, but the system is stronger,” said Medvedev.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Philippa Fletcher)
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