Praise for Putin after meeting
SLAMMED BY HIS OWN REPUBLICAN PARTY Russian president ‘presents country as peer power to US’.
Russia’s political and media establishment heralded talks between the Russian and US leaders in Helsinki as a victory for Vladimir Putin in breaking down Western resolve to treat Russia as a pariah.
“The West’s attempts to isolate Russia failed,” read the headline on a report on Monday’s summit meeting in state-run newspaper Rossiisskaya Gazeta.
The praise from Russia’s elite for Putin’s performance at the summit contrasted sharply with the reaction in Washington where US President Donald Trump’s own Republican party accused him of failing to stand up to Putin.
In Moscow, there was a recognition that the summit did not produce any breakthroughs on issues such as Syria, Ukraine or arms control. The Kremlin, in the run-up to the summit, had played down expectations of major progress.
Instead, the focus was on the symbolism of the leader of the world’s biggest superpower sitting down oneon-one with Putin after four years of international isolation, triggered by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.
“It’s funny to recall the nonsense from Obama et al about Russia being a weak ‘regional power’,” said Alexey Pushkov, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, referring to former US president Barack Obama.
Asked by reporters in Helsinki how the talks had gone, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: “Magnificent ... better than super.” Putin has based a large part of his domestic appeal – both to ordinary people and the elites – on a narrative about restoring the international heft that Russia lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
A post-summit news conference in Helsinki with Trump and Putin was “everything the Kremlin realistically could have hoped for,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia scholar at the Institute of International Relations Prague.
“Putin gets to look like the urbane grown-up and presents Russia as peer power to US,” Galeotti wrote on Twitter. –
Magnificent ... better than super.