Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Putin's Trolling of the West Is Not Just a Tactic

Meddling with Western elections looks like a mistake, but it's part of a grim, lonely long game.

November 10, 2017 at 4:56 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

A high tolerance for pain.
Photographer: Adam Berry/Getty Images

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The White House snubbed Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday by announcing that President Donald Trump wouldn't formally meet with him at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vietnam -- even though the Kremlin had said repeatedly that a meeting would take place. It's clear that the dialogue between the U.S. and Russia is broken to a greater extent than the Kremlin is comfortable with.

Could it be that Putin made a strategic mistake by openly trolling the U.S. and other Western democracies as they held critical elections in 2016 and 2017?