IF THIS MEETING WAS A SOCCER MATCH, PUTIN APPEARS TO HAVE WON.

Summit theatrics vindication for Kremlin

If Monday’s summit in Helsinki had been a World Cup match, then Russia’s Vladimir Putin appears to have won. For as long as he has been in power, the Russian president has been consumed with an itching nostalgia for the lost status of the cold war—an era when moscow and washington looked at one another as equals and the world took notice when they spoke.

Putin has long maintained that sanctions over Crimea are unjust and that the U.S. political establishment poisoned relations between the two countries in pursuit of its narrow partisan interests.

So the very theatrics of this summit — a one-on-one meeting between a Russian and U.S. president in a neutral capital (of good Cold War pedigree), while the world held its breath, must have felt like sweet vindication.

To hear Donald Trump blame the United States for poor relations between the two countries must have been the cherry on the cake.

And then to close ranks with Trump to deny allegations of electoral collusion and denounce the U.S. intelligence agencies, like a pair of schoolboy chums covering for one another over copied homework, took matters to another level entirely.

Hard-headed realists will say the test of the summit is whether it changes either country’s behaviour.

So far, there is very little in the way of concrete gains for either president to brag about.

Even when pressed by a Russian journalist, the presidents had precisely nothing of substance to say about Syria, the one burning issue on which they were expected to announce some small initiative.

There was some mumbling about nuclear nonproliferation. That is an undeniably positive change given that Trump once threatened Russia with a new nuclear arms race, but it is also a reliable fallback for U.S. and Russian presidents who need to show they have agreed on something.

Trump said Russian and U.S. security agencies would maintain open channels on anti-terrorist co-operation — another reliable chestnut that Barack Obama wheeled out during his own “reset” with Russia in 2009.

Longtime followers of Putin will have detected echoes of an earlier version of the Russian president. In the first years of the 2000s, a younger Putin appeared to genuinely believe in the possibility of a new partnership with the West.

In the West, most officials say the optimism of that era was scuppered by Putin’s own vices, like poisoning people on British streets.

In Moscow, the received wisdom has always been that those overtures were rebuffed by the arrogance of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Now Putin seems to feel he finally has a U.S. president prepared to see things from his point of view.

It is a development that will be greeted with deep alarm in places such as Ukraine, which is still fighting a war with the Russian military machine in which people die every week and which sees U.S. diplomatic backing as crucial to its survival.

But there is still a fly in the ointment for the Russians. Putin, for all his tactical-level lying, has always been quite consistent about his vision for Russia and the world order. The world — and the Kremlin — have yet to learn how committed Trump is to their new “extraordinary relationship”.

ANTTI AIMO-KOIVISTO / LEHTIKUVA VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Security removes Sam Husseini, a journalist who held up a sign reading “Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty,” before a press conference with U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday.