rykov

<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">In the intervening two years, Mr. Putin’s ire at America only increased. He blamed the United States for pushing for a full investigation of illicit doping by Russian athletes, which would lead to mass suspensions of the country’s Olympic stars. And when the leaked Panama Papers were published in April 2016, revealing that a cellist who was Mr. Putin’s close friend had secret accounts that had handled $2 billion, he charged that it was a smear operation by the United States.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">Image</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">Russian Olympic athletes this year in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Mr. Putin had blamed the United States for pushing to investigate the doping scandal that had engulfed the team.CreditJames Hill for The New York Times]</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">“Who is behind these provocations?” he asked. “We know that among them are employees of official American institutions.”</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">Then something unexpected happened. Of the more than 20 major-party candidates running for the American presidency, only Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin as a “strong” leader and brushed off criticism of Russia. Only he had little interest in the traditional American preoccupation with democracy and human rights. Only he had explored business interests in Russia for years, repeatedly pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow and bringing his beauty pageant there in 2013.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow,” the future candidate tweeted at the time, adding wistfully, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">If Mr. Putin had been designing his ideal leader for the United States, he could hardly have done better than Donald Trump.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">For some years, Mr. Trump had attracted attention from Russian conservatives with Kremlin ties. <b>A Putin ally named Konstantin Rykov had begun promoting Mr. Trump as a future president in 2012 and created a Russian-language website three years later to support his candidacy. A Russian think tank, Katehon, had begun running analyses pushing Mr. Trump.</b></span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">Mr. Trump as a candidate was “tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid,” wrote Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist philosopher considered a major influence on Mr. Putin, in February 2016. Mr. Dugin declared that Mr. Trump probably had “no chance of winning” against the “quite annoying” Mrs. Clinton, but added a postscript: “We want to put trust in Donald Trump. Vote for Trump, and see what will happen.”</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">Against all expectations, Republicans across the country began to do just that, and soon Mr. Trump was beating the crowd of mainstream Republicans. Mr. Putin, said Yuval Weber, a Russia scholar, “found for the first time since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that he has a prospective president of the United States who fundamentally views international issues from the Russian point of view.”</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">...</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"></div>