Days after Donald Trump cited the threat from Russia as a reason to annex Greenland, the U.S. president invited Vladimir Putin to join his Board of Peace.

Whiplash, anyone?

Not to the Russians. Over the past weeks, Moscow’s response to Trump’s Greenland gambit has been just as disorienting. Kremlin officials have alternated between feigned sympathy for the residents of the Arctic island and open enthusiasm for Trump’s efforts to bring it into the American embrace.

The contradiction points to a deliberate strategy: exploiting the crisis to weaken Western unity while keeping Trump focused elsewhere.

In the weeks since Trump captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and threatened to intervene in Iran, Russia appears to have set aside its other geopolitical ambitions, including in the Arctic, to keep Washington in its corner on Ukraine. Meanwhile, it seems to be hoping tensions over Greenland will crack NATO and drive further wedges between Kyiv’s most important allies. 

“It would have been difficult to imagine something like this happening before,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during a press conference on Tuesday, drily gloating over the diminishing “prospects of preserving NATO as a unified Western military-political bloc.” 

The alarm over Greenland has already paid dividends for the Kremlin, pushing Ukraine off the agenda in Davos as European leaders scramble to the Alpine ski town to try to defuse the crisis.

“Greenland [is the] ideal solution,” wrote Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, on his Telegram channel. 

Tensions between Europe and the U.S. could serve as a stepping stone to the break-up of NATO. “Then the EU will be forced to stop its war against Russia,” he continued. 

After years spent bashing the “collective West,” pro-Kremlin propagandists are suggesting the country can now sit back and watch their enemies stumble.

“Our guiding principle is: Let them tear each other apart,” pundit Vladimir Kornilov said on a political talk show Friday, with evident relish.

Lavrov took time during his press conference for a bit of trolling.

Rejecting claims that Moscow covets Greenland, Russia’s top diplomat said the island matters to U.S. security in much the same way Crimea matters to Russia — referring to the Ukrainian peninsula Russia seized in 2014, precipitating its conflict with Kyiv.

“Greenland is not an obvious part of Denmark, right?” he said. “It is a colonial conquest. The fact that its residents are now accustomed to living there and feel comfortable is another matter. But the problem of former colonies is becoming an increasingly serious matter.”

In dismissing claims that it is a military threat to Denmark, Moscow has carefully avoided criticizing Trump. Instead, it has cast his move as “historic.”

In his first remarks Monday on the unfolding crisis, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov cited unnamed “experts” who, he said, believed Trump would “make history” by annexing Greenland.

“Leaving aside whether this would be good or bad, it’s hard not to agree with these experts,” he said. 

State media has noted that if the U.S. were to annex Greenland, it would become the second-largest country on Earth — after Russia.