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(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump is making all of Vladimir Putin’s dreams come true in Ukraine, but even at the Kremlin officials find the head-spinning turn of events hard to believe. 

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Friday’s extraordinary Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy by the US leader and his vice president, JD Vance, exceeded anything Russia could have expected. 

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The response out of Moscow was swift. Former President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, said Trump told Zelenskiy “the truth to his face” before adding: “But it’s not enough – military aid should be stopped.” On the X social media platform, Medvedev called Zelenskiy an “insolent pig.”

Trump and Vance “wiped their feet on Zelenskiy like a doormat,” said Alexander Dugin, a political scientist in Moscow who advocates a “Russian World” ideology to justify Kremlin expansion. “Game over.”

Kirill Dmitriev, the one-time Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker turned influential Putin envoy, posted a video on X of the heated exchange between Trump and Zelenskiy with a one-word description: “Historic.”

The official response has been more circumspect so far. One official close to the Kremlin said that Russia has no influence on the US. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t reply to questions seeking comments. 

At first glance, the Russian president can afford to sit back and watch as things go his way. But many in the Kremlin still don’t trust what’s happening in Washington. Russian leadership doesn’t fully understand Trump’s strategy and is wary traps, a person close to the Kremlin said earlier this week.

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“In Russia, they are also in shock and, of course, they are very happy,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said in a phone interview. “Putin is lucky, but there will be no automatic success, no automatic victory”.

One particular area of concern for the Kremlin is that Trump is impatient. After the altercation with Zelenskiy he repeated again that he wants an “immediate ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine – something he vowed to engineer soon after taking office in January. 

With Russia’s economy showing signs of slowing, Putin might be willing to end the war. Yet Moscow has ruled out a ceasefire multiple times, including this week. 

Russian forces continue to make grinding progress in the ground war in eastern Ukraine, albeit at a huge cost in casualties. Without US backing, Kremlin forces stand to advance further.  

“The differences between the United States and Ukraine play into Russia‘s hands, but this may lead to a prolongation of the war, which Moscow is ready to end,” Andrey Sushentsov, dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO University in the Russian capital, said in an interview.

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Otherwise, Trump and Zelenskiy’s meeting looks like a clear win for the Kremlin. With Ukrainian elections having been suspended by martial law imposed after Russia’s 2022 invasion, Putin has repeatedly questioned Zelenskiy’s legitimacy as head of state. Now US voices close to the Trump administration are echoing Putin’s desire for Zelenskiy to go.

From a Russian perspective, it shows that US relations with Ukraine — and with Europe more broadly — have all but collapsed. That was a goal Putin laid out in 2007 in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. Many of his talking points were echoed in Vance’s assault on European values at the same meeting last month. 

Even before any negotiations to end the war have started, Trump has already conceded Russia’s demand that Ukraine abandon its ambition to join the NATO alliance. Top US officials have said it’s unrealistic for Ukraine to expect to regain territory occupied by Russia since 2014 — including the Crimean peninsula – and Trump has ruled out the presence of US troops as peacekeepers in support of a ceasefire.

Zelenskiy left the White House on Friday without signing the minerals deal that Trump had made clear is the linchpin to continued US engagement with Kyiv. Trump posted on social media that Zelenskiy was “not ready for peace if America is involved” and that Zelenskiy had “disrespected” the US.

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The fallout will likely be a sharp reduction in US funding for Ukraine, said Sergei Markov, a political consultant with close ties to the Kremlin. It showed that Zelenskiy “must leave the post of president as quickly as possible,” he wrote on Telegram.

NBC News reported Friday that the State Department has scrapped an initiative to help repair Ukraine’s energy grid after constant Russian missile attacks. The move was expected after most USAID projects were suspended as part of a broad US foreign aid freeze by the new administration. 

For stunned European leaders, the seismic implications of the White House clash were coming into stark focus. The fate of Ukraine and their own continent’s security may now rest with them alone. 

“Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, a former prime minister of Estonia, wrote on X. “It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”

(Updates with analyst comments starting from eighth paragraph)

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