Russian politicians and state-owned media flaunted the closely watched Putin-Trump summit in Alaska as a historic success.
The high-stakes meeting, at which the U.S. President Donald Trump hoped to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, fell short of its goals.
Instead, the one-on-one delivered a propaganda triumph for Putin and Russia, boosted by the American leader applauding the Kremlin chief as he arrived on a red-carpeted tarmac and laughing with him during a short ride alone in Trump’s presidential limousine.
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and current deputy chairman of the Russian security council, used the meeting, that took place on the same day Russia launched a wave of attacks across Ukraine, as a greenlight to continue waging its war on Ukraine, which Russia calls “a special military operation.”
“Importantly, the meeting proved that negotiations are possible without preconditions and can take place simultaneously with the continuation of the special military operation,” Medvedev said in a post on Telegram.
In the week before the Alaska summit, Moscow made notable territorial gains, particularly in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, hoping to leverage military pressure to influence the negotiations.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova mocked Western news outlets on her Telegram channel. “Western media are in a state that can be called obsession bordering on complete madness: For three years they talked about Russia’s isolation, and today they saw the red carpet used to welcome the Russian president in the USA,” Zakharova wrote.
Russian flagship TV channel Rossiya 1 also noted the pomp and the cordial reception given to Putin. “The Red carpet, handshakes and footage and photographs that are in all global publications and TV channels,” said Rossiya 1, adding it was the first time that Trump had met a visiting leader off their plane at the airport.
Meanwhile, Putin himself presented the summit, the first between Russian and American leaders in more than four years, as a breakthrough in Washington-Moscow relations, calling the countries “close neighbors separated by an ocean” who should “turn the page” and return to cooperation.
Russian state-controlled agency Interfax highlighted a statement by a Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who said that “the world is safer today than it was yesterday.”
While state news agency RIA quoted an expert who said that “Putin achieved exactly what he most wanted, which was to begin to repair his relationship with President Trump.”
RBC, for its part, quoted several Russian experts, one of whom said that the meeting had a similar significance as the meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík in 1986. That meeting didn’t lead to any immediate results, but facilitated the nuclear arms control treaty signed the next year.