Recently, though, when it comes to Russia, the White House does appear to have been blowing more cold than hot, which explains the headline in today’s edition of Moskovsky Komsomolets: “The Russian-American Chill.”
Following Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s most recent telephone conversation on 3 July – their sixth this year – President Trump revealed that the two leaders “didn’t make any progress” towards ending the war in Ukraine.
“I’m not happy about that,” he added.
Four days later, President Trump threatened to impose a 10 percent tariff on any country aligned with the BRICS, the group of nations that includes Russia.
On Tuesday, his frustration boiled over with some of his strongest language so far: “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” President Trump said at a cabinet meeting.
“He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Today I asked for the Kremlin’s reaction.
“We are pretty calm about this,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told me on a Kremlin conference call for journalists.
“Trump’s way of talking is generally quite harsh…we plan to continue our dialogue with Washington to mend our broken bilateral relations…we hope that Trump and his team will continue their efforts to get the peace process back to the realm of diplomacy.”
The Kremlin was trying, at least, to sound diplomatic.
The Russian press? It wasn’t even trying.
In Komsomolskaya Pravda, a political pundit accused Donald Trump of “an absence of geopolitical achievements”.
The tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets wrote about President Trump’s “mercurial temperament, his propensity for sudden moods and chaotic changes of direction”.
This week’s edition of Arguments and Facts mocked Donald Trump over Elon Musk’s new America Party.
“Now every time the US president says ‘Make America Great Again’ he’ll be inadvertently promoting Musk’s party,” the paper wrote.
This is a sea-change from the previously positive coverage in Russia of the Trump administration. Back in March, a political scientist told Izvestia that “America now has more in common with Russia than Washington does with Brussels or Kyiv”.
In May, the business daily Kommersant declared: “Donald Trump’s stance couldn’t be more advantageous to Moscow.
“He refused to strengthen sanctions against Russia and confirmed his determination to develop large-scale trade with Russia.”
The optimism was understandable. Earlier this year, the White House was publicly criticising President Zelensky (not President Putin) and exerting pressure on Kyiv (not Moscow).
The US and Russia had launched bilateral talks to boost their relations.
What’s more, President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff was a frequent visitor to Russia for talks with President Putin. At one of their meetings the Kremlin leader gave him a present to take back for Trump: a portrait of the US president.
It seemed as if Moscow and Washington were destined to forge a new relationship.
But it’s been more than two months since Witkoff’s last visit. And, in June, Russia announced that the US had cancelled the next round of talks between the two countries aimed at restoring the operations of diplomatic missions.