Russian media see a clear win
Agencies praise Putin’s prowess.
MOSCOW — While the Western media saw Friday’s meeting between the American and Russian presidents as a policy-defining moment in Trump’s White House, the Russian media and political commentators saw the global focus on the two-hour discussion as nothing less than a monumental win for Russia.
“Putin’s Day at the G-20,” read one headline from Tass, the state news agency.
“The most important event of the G-20,” Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, was quoted as saying in state media.
The more than two-hour meeting wasn’t just a handshake or photo opportunity, she said. Instead, the two leaders raised and negotiated all of the most important global issues of today, Matviyenko told the state news agency.
“I think this is a result of personal contact, a sincere commitment of the heads of state to solve global problems,” she said.
Prior to the meeting, Russian state media had begun to spin their Trump coverage to paint him as an unreliable ally as the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election persisted and dominated U.S. politics and headlines. Russia’s most radical television presenter, Dmitry Kiselyov, in April labeled Trump more dangerous than North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in his popular weekly magazine show.
But by the time Trump and Putin’s Friday meeting at the G-20 had stretched into the first and then second hour, the mood among the Russian media turned victorious. Putin had received more time with the America leader than expected, and that proved the Russian leader was a global player being consulted on the world’s big issues, the media hinted throughout Friday evening.
By Saturday, state news agencies were glowing in their praise of Putin’s prowess in Hamburg as well as the negotiations between Washington and Moscow on issues such as cybersecurity, allegations of meddling in the U.S. election, a Syrian cease-fire and Ukraine.
The praise came despite differing accounts of the meeting from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. While Tillerson said the two leaders agreed they wanted to move past the U.S. intelligence community’s accusations of Russian election meddling, Lavrov told reporters Trump had accepted Putin’s narrative of events.
“It was a meeting of two strategic adversaries who barely found a way to keep talking through their differences,” said Vladimir Frolov, a Moscow-based political analyst. “And this is the ‘success’ both sides are keen on selling to the domestic audiences.”
Dialogue and discussions are not policy goals, but rather a means to find solutions, Frolov said. Solutions “require painful compromises on core interests.”
And as to Russian-U.S. relations?
The meeting was “a serious step forward, no doubt about it,” Franz Klintsevich, first deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Defense and Security, told Tass.
Russians, or at least the audience the Kremlin state media strive to influence, were inundated with the image of Putin at the G-20 meeting with various heads of state, including China, France, Germany, Brazil, India and South Africa.
“G-20: Trump is looking for allies, Putin finds them” said one headline from RIA Novosti, another Russian state media agency.
Some Russians, however, said they didn’t pay much attention to the hype on the state news.
“We don’t care about all this political stuff,” said Irina Klimkova of Moscow, who said she didn’t follow the news about PutinTrump relations. “We just want Americans to know that we want peace. Tell them that we aren’t bad people.”
“I don’t believe the Russian public was really fixated on the meeting or cared much about its results,” said Frolov, the Moscow political analyst. “Of course, the Russian TV will make sure they do, but in the process, it is building unrealistic public expectations that would be hard to meet.”
Most of Russia’s media are influenced, and in many cases controlled, by the Kremlin. Putin’s daily movements, from meetings with ministers to visits to farflung regions, dominate the nightly news agendas. Political talk shows are tightly controlled and typically consist of discussions focused on the decay of the West, a chaotic and corrupt Ukraine and the threat of foreign enemies on Russia’s borders.
Independent media do exist in Russia, but they are handicapped by a lack of investors willing to fund them and risk falling out of favor with the Kremlin.
Meanwhile on social media, a few Russian observers dissected and debated every handshake and body position between Trump and Putin — in particular, the hand gestures made by the two presidents during the brief media appearance ahead of the meeting. Trump’s hands joined in a triangle, known in some circles as the “Merkel diamond” because German Chancellor Angela Merkel frequently uses the same gesture. Conspiracy theorists added that it’s the same gesture used by Freemasons to signify their membership in the secret society.