The campaign for the 2024 US presidential election has begun. The US presidential election in November 2024 will take place at a very significant moment. That is when the mandate of the Russian peacekeepers in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan will expire. This means that whoever becomes the new US president, by the time he takes office there will be no trace of the ugly pseudo-state entity called "Artsakh" on the territory of Azerbaijan.

Nevertheless, both separatists ("Artsakh" and not only) and Russian hurrah-patriots are for some reason very hopeful about Donald Trump's "saving" victory for them. Encouraged by the "hope" of a possible victory of Donald Trump, the separatists began to publish on social networks posts with approximately the same content as those recently published on the separatist resource "ABKHAZIA-CENTRE":

"Will the fate of Abkhazia be decided in Washington?

2024 is a period of very important elections. Presidents will be elected in the Russian Federation and the United States, and a parliament will be elected in Georgia. All three campaigns will be closely watched in Sukhum. No wonder, as the future of the small republic depends largely on the geopolitical situation.

In Russia, the head of state will be elected in March. In Abkhazia, too, because the Abkhazian president is a Russian citizen who faithfully goes to the polls to vote for the permanent Russian leader. There can be no surprises here, the CEC will give 90-95 per cent. These are not the most important elections for Abkhazia. They are routine.

Much more interesting elections will be held in Georgia, and that is why the railway will not be opened until autumn, so as not to anger Georgian voters. Aslan Shevardnadze openly declared this year that he was interested in seeing the ruling party retain power in Tbilisi.

And finally, the US presidential election. The battle between Trump and Biden. Russia's best hope. Trump's victory, the cessation of arms supplies to Ukraine, the division of Ukraine, a pause. Before a new war. The Polish campaign, the naked Baltic, the Anglo-Saxons. A lot of work for the PMCs. These elections are very important for Abkhazia, the fate of Abkhazia will be decided in one-storey America".

For some reason, separatists continue to insist that Donald Trump is hardly "pro-Russian", or even "a protégé of the great Putin". And they say that as soon as Trump becomes president of the United States, he will start sharing Ukraine, Poland, recognising the "independence" of the separatists, etc. with Russia.

The fact that this is complete nonsense is obvious to all right-thinking people. It is enough to remember what the real policy of Donald Trump was when he was president of the USA. And this policy, let us remind you, was not "pro-Russian" at all, quite the opposite.

The separatists have forgotten that such "victorious milestones" for the separatist movement in the post-Soviet space as Russia's annexation of Crimea, the beginning of the war in Donbass and the "legalisation" of the Donbass separatists through the Minsk agreements took place before Donald Trump became US president - under his predecessor Barack Obama in 2014-2015.

Incidentally, after Donald Trump's election victory in November 2016, there was a complete "freeze" on the implementation of the Minsk agreements, which legalise separatism and are binding on Ukraine, and on which the Kremlin was counting so much. After all, by analogy with these agreements, which essentially removed Donbass from Ukrainian jurisdiction, it was assumed that other separatists would also be legalised. Including the "Artsakh" separatists.

Moreover, in Syria, when the Russian PMC "Wagner" tried to move into the zone that the USA claimed as "theirs", the Russian formations were dealt a heavy blow. Russia then "rubbed off" and sharply reduced its activity in Syria. On the other hand, Turkey began to act more assertively in Syria, creating security zones along its border.

On 24 July 2018, President Trump's administration (represented by then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) issued the Crimea Declaration on behalf of the then acting and all future US administrations, declaring its refusal to recognise Russia's annexation of Crimea. In doing so, the D. Trump administration followed a historical precedent. Let us recall that on 23 July 1940, President Roosevelt's administration (represented by Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles) proclaimed the refusal of that and all future administrations to recognise the annexation of the three Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This then became a good reason for international recognition of the independence of these states in 1991, and then of the other republics of the USSR. In other words, it was under Donald Trump that the issue of Crimea was finally closed once and for all by the US. Crimea is Ukraine". This means that any redrawing of borders in the Soviet space will, by definition, never be recognised by the US.

Most importantly, it was under Trump, at the end of his term as US president, that the liberating 44-day war in Karabakh took place and Azerbaijan regained its territorial integrity. Unlike the Obama administration in April 2016, the Trump administration did not take any diplomatic steps to "brake" the liberation of Azerbaijani territory and eliminate the ugly separatist entity called Artsakh.

On this basis, the separatists' current hopes for Trump are completely incomprehensible. Donald Trump is in favour of a strong United States and has absolutely no interest in the continuation of Russian aggression in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries.

If Trump sometimes (as he did during his 2016 presidential campaign) allows himself to make statements that can be interpreted as "pro-Russian" with a stretch of the imagination, it is in fact easy to explain. Kremlin propaganda has succeeded in presenting the Russian Federation to the world as a supposed "bastion of conservatism". A significant proportion of Trump voters are conservatives. And for this reason alone, a number of conservatives, who very rarely sympathise with the RF, do not fully understand the real state of affairs in that country. Trump simply doesn't waste time trying to "convince" them.

But this does not mean that he will recognise the "independence" of the separatists if he becomes the US president again (although it is unlikely, given the negative trends around him). Most likely, Donald Trump, as in October-November 2020, will not even pay attention to the liquidation of the separatist entities, just as in 2020 he ignored the cries of Armenian nationalists and "Artsakh" separatists about "genocide" when the Azerbaijani army was restoring the territorial integrity of their country.

George Kvinitadze