BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
- Despite the Kremlin’s neutral stance, Russian state media shows it favors Donald Trump.
- State media has ridiculed Kamala Harris while portraying Trump in a positive light.
- Meta and TikTok have previously banned Russian state media for election interference.
The Kremlin has long maintained it doesn’t care who will win the US presidential election on November 5th.
“Generally speaking, the outcome of this election makes no difference to us,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Newsweek earlier this month.
But despite what Russian officials claim, the country’s state media tells a very different story.
“Russia absolutely cares a great deal about who wins the US election,” Ann Marie Dailey, a policy researcher at RAND, told Business Insider.
“Russia will seek to sway the election in a way that minimizes US support for Ukraine.”
State media coverage
Per Reuters, Harris’ tendency to burst out laughing during interviews and debates has been ridiculed in Russian state TV broadcasts.
Russian state TV has also played compilations of some of Harris’ worst moments and made frequent sexist and racist comments about the presidential candidate.
“Kamala with the nuclear button is worse than a monkey with a grenade,” Andrei Sidorov, the dean of the global politics department at Moscow State University, said on the Russian state-run Rossiya 1 channel, according to Politico.
By comparison, Russian state TV’s main Channel One news program often portrays Trump and running mate, JD Vance, as confident and intelligent, Reuters said.
The discrepancy between how broadcasters view the two candidates was particularly clear after last month’s presidential debate, which was widely regarded as a clear win for Harris.
However, Russian channels struggled to explain what had happened.
According to the Daily Beast, hosts and pundits on Russian state television said that Trump was somehow “sabotaged” or “disadvantaged.”
Covert influence operations
It’s not just seemingly biased reporting. Last month, TikTok said it removed accounts associated with Russian state media for “engaging in covert influence operations.”
Meta also banned RT, Rossiya Segodnya, and other Russian state media networks from its platforms, claiming the outlets had used deceptive tactics to carry out interference activity.
In a statement to the BBC at the time, RT said: “It’s cute how there’s a competition in the West — who can try to spank RT the hardest, in order to make themselves look better.
“Don’t worry, where they close a door, and then a window, our ‘partisans’ (or in your parlance, guerrilla fighters) will find the cracks to crawl through — as by your own admission, we are apt at doing.”
In September, the Department of Justice said in an indictment that an unnamed Tenessee firm — later identified as conservative company Tenet Media — took almost $10 million from the Russian state media company RT.
The aim, according to the Department of Justice, was to “create and distribute content to US audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.”
Tenet Media published content from six influencers, all of whom publicly support former President Donald Trump. The influencers distanced themselves from the accusations and described themselves as being “victims.”
Trump’s influence
“The Kremlin does absolutely care about this election the most,” Mathieu Boulegue, a consulting fellow at Chatham House, told BI.
“They would much rather prefer a Trump presidency. They care so much about the elections that they’re trying to rig and to play the elections by using propaganda, information warfare, and probably cyber activities.”
For Putin, a Trump presidency could help him achieve his goals in Ukraine. Trump has praised Putin for being “smart” and “genius” after he began his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
He has consistently backed a swift end to the war in Ukraine and has questioned why the US is helping Ukraine defend itself.
The war has been costly for Russia. An unnamed US official told Reuters in February that Russia’s war in Ukraine has cost it up to $212 billion.
A December 2023 RAND report projected the direct costs of the war for Russia through 2024 to be $132 billion.
Though Trump has offered few details on how the war could end, a peace plan suggested by Vance on a podcast in September indicates that it’d involve Ukraine ceding the territory Russia holds and pledging neutrality.
William Pomerantz, an analyst at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, previously told BI that “Trump believes that he can end the war in Ukraine in a week, but that would require conceding to all of Putin’s demands.”
The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request by BI for comment.