Putin praised Trump almost immediately in 2016. Not after Biden’s victory.

MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first world leaders to congratulate President Donald Trump on his victory in the 2016 US election. Yet on Monday, days after Joe Biden was screened for the presidency, Putin remained silent as other world leaders came out to congratulate the former vice president and his vice president Kamala Harris.

Speaking to reporters on Monday in Moscow, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov explained the silence in diplomatic terms: Russia doesn’t think it would be right to congratulate a winner before an official decision is made. was made, and noted that Trump was moving forward with legal challenges. to election results.

“The outgoing president has announced some legal procedures, so this situation is different, and we consider it correct to wait for an official announcement,” Peskov said, adding that “the differences are quite obvious” between the election of 2016 and the 2020 election. “There were no court challenges announcements.”

By taking this position, the Kremlin appears to be hanging on to Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump has so far refused to concede defeat to Biden, promising on Saturday to push the lawsuits forward, claiming – without providing any evidence – that illegal ballots had been counted in several states.

Neither Trump nor his campaign have been able to produce evidence to support their allegations of electoral fraud.

Republicans in Congress have largely avoided the problem, although some in Trump’s orbit have encouraged him to keep fighting and others have urged him to tone down his rhetoric.

None of this has stopped the Russian state media and various government officials below Putin from accepting and following up on these claims. The message is being conveyed to the Russian public: America’s statements of how a model democratic system works are lies, there is no free and fair electoral process in America.

On Sunday evening, one of the Kremlin’s most prominent spokespersons, Dmitry Kisdomov, in his flagship News of the Week program on state television repeated Trump’s accounts of the mail ballots – that an overwhelming majority of them were in favor of Biden, and that “Voting by mail is cheating.”

There is no evidence to support the claim that postal voting allowed more cheating in the election than other methods of voting.

In many ways, the Russian state television narrative mimicked not only Trump’s accusations of irregularities, but also accusations of fraud and manipulation that Russia often faces from Western media and observers. .

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Trump’s refusal to concede and his allegations of electoral fraud have given state media an opportunity to label American democracy a sham. These reports, aimed at the Russian public, are ultimately aimed at undermining any admiration Russians may have for the United States as a model democracy.

But some in Russia see the hotly contested 2020 election result as proof that the United States and its election is a role model.

Russian Opposition Leader Alexei Navalny, currently in Germany recovering from an attempted poisoning in Russia earlier this year with a deadly nerve agent, wrote on Twitter last week: “I woke up, I am went on Twitter to see who won. At the moment, it is not clear. Now it’s the election.

Navalny was the first prominent Russian politician to congratulate Biden on his victory in what he wrote as “free and fair elections.”

“It is a privilege that is not available to all countries,” Navalny wrote on Twitter on Sunday.