Kremlin wary of election surprises sees Kamala Harris as a wildcard

“If Kamala Harris wins the election, it will be a huge disappointment for the Kremlin,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of R.Politik, a Russian political consultancy now based in France. “Not because they expect some concrete anti-Russian steps but because the nature of American politics will become, from their point of view, irrational and unpragmatic and self-destructive.”

Harris, said Stanovaya, “represents what they call in Moscow the liberal terrorists, liberal dictators. With such people, it is going to be very difficult to end the conflict.” She added: “All the windows will close shut.”

For Russia, the tumult of Trump’s presidency, his admiration for authoritarian rulers like Vladimir Putin and his bashing of NATO and the European Union, was a gift. Trump’s wild boast that he could end the war in Ukraine in a day suggested he could force Kyiv to surrender territory.

And Biden, although he sent unprecedented military and financial aid to Ukraine, was appreciated by many Russian foreign policy hands as hailing from a Cold War era when Russia was feared as a superpower rival. They view Biden as a predictable actor who would not risk an escalation into direct hostilities with Russia and who understands and respects that Russia possesses a large nuclear arsenal. “Under Biden, there was at least an understanding of red lines,” Stanovaya said.

Harris, largely unknown to the Russians, is viewed with alarm. “The deep state will lead under Harris,” said Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst.

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has launched propaganda campaigns across the West aimed at undermining support for Ukraine, and promoting far-right isolationist views, internal Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Washington Post have shown.

But Biden’s departure was the second recent unpleasant surprise for Russia in Western politics — following the unexpected defeat in the French parliamentary elections of the far-right party Moscow has backed as a political ally, National Rally.

Some former Russian officials said they feared Harris’s candidacy was a sign the U.S. liberal establishment is engineering the elections to block right-wing isolationist forces. Given the Kremlin’s grip on Russian elections, some Russians struggle to believe elections can be fair and genuinely unpredictable, or to grasp the concept of coalition-building in parliamentary political systems.

“Look at what happened in France,” said one close Putin associate, a former senior Russian official. Like others in this article, the former official spoke on the condition of anonymity to…