It’s been a long-standing Kremlin strategy to drive a permanent wedge between the United States and Europe, dividing and weakening its traditional adversaries in the West.
For years, Russia has promoted sabotage and disinformation to undermine Western institutions, seen as stubborn obstacles to Moscow’s territorial ambitions and dreams of regaining Soviet-style status and power.
Breaking up NATO, the powerful Western military alliance, has been a particularly potent fantasy, especially since the Ukraine war. Concerns about possible NATO expansion were used by the Kremlin to justify its brutal, full-scale invasion nearly four years ago.
Imagine the glee, then, in the corridors of Kremlin power, at the prospect of Western unity splintering and of NATO, for 80 years a bulwark against Russian threats, finally imploding over the unlikely issue of Greenland and the unwelcome overtures being made towards the Danish territory by US President Donald Trump.
Russia, watching agog from the sidelines, as its old foes consume themselves.
“China and Russia must be having a field day,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, observed on X after Trump threatened extraordinary tariffs on European allies who oppose a US takeover.
Both China and Russia firmly reject allegations they have territorial designs on Greenland – even the Danish military says there is no significant invasion threat from the east.
But, indeed, on Russian state television, pro-Kremlin pundits rejoiced over Trump’s Greenland moves, which they assessed as “delivering a catastrophic blow to NATO” and as being “truly tremendous for Russia.”
The understandable view is that, with the NATO alliance facing its biggest crisis in decades and transatlantic unity potentially splintering, support in the West for Ukraine’s war effort is sure to falter, handing Moscow an even stronger whip hand on the battlefield.
Unfortunately for Kyiv, that may prove to be an accurate assessment.
But the champagne corks in the Kremlin aren’t popping just yet.
At least initially, there has been a relatively muted, even critical official response from Moscow, with the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, telling journalists that Trump was, on Greenland, “operating outside the norms of international law” – striking from a Kremlin that has itself tolerated or overseen untold violations of international norms and laws over years of increasing authoritarianism at home and abroad.
US control over Greenland may well be seen in Moscow as posing a genuine challenge to Russia’s own dominance in the Arctic region.
But the Kremlin likely has deeper concerns, as it watches – like the rest of the world – with discomfort and alarm as the unpredictable Trump administration wields seemingly unbridled military and economic global power.
“Unilateral and dangerous actions often substitute diplomacy, efforts to come to a compromise or find solutions which would suit everyone,” Russian President Vladimir Putin recently lamented about the state of the world in his first foreign policy speech of the new year.
“Instead of having states engage in dialogue with one another, there are those relying on the might-makes-right principle to assert their unilateral narratives, those who believe that they can impose their will, lecture others how they must live and issue orders,” Putin added, with no hint of self-awareness, in an apparent reference to US actions on the international stage.
Already, Moscow’s network of alliances – badly bruised by the overthrow last year of Russian-backed Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad – is being quickly picked apart.
Iran, a longtime Russian ally, was targeted in painful US and Israeli airstrikes last year. In the aftermath of the recent brutal crackdown on anti-government protestors there, it may soon be struck again, threatening the survival of the pro-Moscow Islamic regime.
Earlier this month, the dramatic seizure by US forces of the Venezuelan president, Nicholas Maduro, a Kremlin favorite, was another slap in the face for Moscow.
And talk of Cuba, a traditional Russian client and US foe, being next on Washington’s regime change hit list hints at further foreign policy humiliation ahead for the Kremlin.
Moscow has long disparaged the post-World War II rules-based international order as little more than a Western tool, fraught with double standards, to contain its adversaries, the Kremlin foremost amongst them.
Moscow has openly challenged the UN Charter’s prohibition on changing borders by force, and routinely pressed for a world where great powers are entitled to exclusive spheres of influence.
Washington now appears to increasingly share that Russian worldview – on paper, an important victory for Moscow’s persistence.
But celebrations of that win are, for the moment, on hold amid concerns about what kind of dangerous new world may now be ushered in.
Coping with an increasingly rash Trump may prove a sizeable challenge for a Kremlin used to dealing with a more stable and predictable US administration.
As one influential Russian tabloid, Moskovskij Komsomolets, referring to Trump as “the chief doctor of the madhouse,” anxiously commented, “we get the feeling that the head doctor of the asylum has gone mad too, and that everything has gone to pieces.”
