Russian state media couldn’t help crowing over the country’s return to the top table of international politics.
Talks in Saudi Arabia between U.S. and Russian officials, led by each country’s foreign ministers, lasted more than four hours. It was the first high-level, face-to-face contact between American and Russian delegations since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
And as far as Moscow’s state-directed media commentators were concerned, it was a big win for the Russian president.
Better still, and to state media’s evident delight, the sidelining of the pesky Europeans ― and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ― has firmly put them in their place.
Their exclusion is being played as a big humbling of Europe, and a humiliation for the Ukrainian leader. The Kremlin has long tried to cast doubt on Zelenskyy’s political legitimacy, particularly since he outstayed his five-year presidential term which was due to end in May 2024 (Ukrainian law prohibits elections being held while martial law is in effect).
The gleeful coverage has been running unabated since last week’s 90-minute phone call between Donald Trump and Putin — a conversation that Russia’s media underscored was initiated by the U.S. president rather than his Russian counterpart. TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, head of Rossiya Segodnya, said on his flagship show that “it wasn’t us who broke off relations” so it was fitting for Trump to make the call.
As with other top state media presenters, Kiselyov has been following the lead of Russian officials to couch the meeting in Riyadh as the first stage in a much bigger possible restoration of Russian-American relations, and as a step toward a full-blown summit between Putin and Trump themselves.
And in Saudi Arabia, a member of the Russian delegation, Yuri Ushakov, a key Kremlin foreign policy adviser since 2012 and former Russian ambassador to the U.S., also highlighted how the talks are being focused on Russian-U.S. relations.
“We have agreed to take account of each other’s interests and develop bilateral relations, since both Moscow and Washington are interested in this,” he told Channel One Russia.
The new world order
Preparing for possible Ukrainian peace negotiations is being portrayed in the Russian media almost as secondary in the bigger picture of Putin and Trump coming together to decide the shape of a new multipolar world order.
The coverage gives some hint as to what the Kremlin will prioritize in these opening rounds of diplomacy — namely, to set the stage for the two men’s meeting of minds.
In the Russian narrative it is the Americans who are at last catching up with a prescient Putin and coming round to his way of thinking. “All things on which Trump is building his revolution — from banning men from women’s sports and stating the fact that there are only two genders, to support for traditional values and skepticism over the West’s green agenda — he [Putin] was talking about long before Trump,” Kiselyov opined on his show.
Many public health agencies and scientists maintain that gender is a social construct and does not necessarily correlate with sex assigned at birth. The Trump administration has pushed back forcefully against this line of thinking with anti-trans rhetoric and legislation curtailing the rights of transgender people.
According to the independent Russian media outlet Meduza, Kremlin strategists are keen to ensure that Putin is seen as being in the driving seat and not Trump. “The [Russian] president would appear passive — in other words, weak — by comparison. It would look like Putin failed where Trump succeeded. That’s not an image anyone wants,” a Kremlin strategist told the outlet.
And Russian media are being instructed to portray Kyiv and the Europeans as unimportant and weak and increasingly losing any purchase on the course of events. The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda told readers Europe is in a state of “shock and horror.”
Also, judging from the media coverage, a second aim is to establish that any possible end to the war will not only be decided bilaterally between Moscow and Washington and everyone else should be seen as bit players — and that any settlement will largely be on Russian terms.
State media has repeatedly emphasized that Ukraine won’t get back any of the territory Russia has occupied since the invasion, nor will Ukraine ever be allowed to join NATO.
Moscow’s media gloats over US-Russia talks
Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay
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