Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to try to test U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris if she is elected president, said Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who was released from a Russian penal colony in August as part of a historic East-West prisoner swap.
“He will test her durability,” said Yashin in an interview with Foreign Policy on Friday, adding, “Putin is a sexist. He doesn’t respect women.”
The Russian president likely expects U.S. support for Ukraine to diminish after the election and seeks to strike a grand bargain with Washington.
“Putin hopes to conclude a deal with the new administration to divide into spheres of interest and influence—not only Eastern Europe but the whole world,” said Yashin, a longtime political activist who was sentenced to more than eight years imprisonment for denouncing the Russian war in Ukraine.
Whoever wins the White House, they must deal with the Russian leader from a position of strength, Yashin said: “Putin will go as far as he is allowed to go.”
He likened any efforts to strike a deal with the Russian president over Ukraine to the 1938 Munich Agreement that sought to appease Nazi Germany by allowing it to annex part of Czechoslovakia.
Any deal would be “a direct step toward escalation—a direct step toward a third world war,” Yashin said.
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