To seasoned diplomatic observers, US President Donald Trump’s furious dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office was a planned political mugging, a trap set by the Trump administration to discredit the Ukrainian leader and remove him as an obstacle to whatever comes next.
Whether it was orchestrated or not, Moscow – which reacted with glee to the White House slanging match – is now anticipating talks aimed at rebuilding the US-Russia relationship will continue, even accelerate, in the weeks ahead.
Nothing has been announced in public. But, privately, there’s talk of the Trump-Putin summit, always on the cards, now being fast-tracked.
There is also renewed optimism in Moscow that, with President Zelensky at odds with President Trump and his team, difficult negotiations to end the war in Ukraine will now take a back seat to a raft of potentially lucrative US-Russia economic deals already being tabled behind closed doors.
Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, is where the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov led the first round of extraordinary talks last month, sidelining Ukraine.
Separately, the Financial Times is reporting that there have been efforts to involve US investors in the restarting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, which Germany halted at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Dmitriev has called for the Trump administration and Russia to start “building a better future for humanity,” and to “focus on investment, economic growth, AI breakthroughs,” and long-term joint scientific projects like “Mars exploration,” even posting a highly produced computer graphic, on Elon Musk’s X social media platform, showing an imagined joint US-Russia-Saudi mission to Mars, on board what appears to be a Space X rocket.
Putting aside the many risks, there are clearly vast profits to be made in doing business with Russia, which incidentally also has the world’s fourth biggest reserves of rare earths, far bigger than Ukraine’s.
That clearly appeals to the mercantile President Trump, whose relentless pursuit of a lucrative deal is being harnessed by the Russian state.
“Trump’s business acumen crushes Biden’s narratives. The attempt to defeat Russia collapsed,” Dmitriev commented on X.
But what has been witnessed since Trump’s inauguration in January seems to be about way more than money but a fundamental resetting of US-Russia ties.
By so closely embracing the Kremlin, the Trump administration risks turning its back on the Western allies, leaving Europe isolated in a seismic shift of Washington’s global stance.
Even the Kremlin, somewhat taken aback by the speed of events, has publicly taken note.
“The new (US) administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told Russian state television in remarks which aired Sunday.
But why the US president would choose the Kremlin over America’s traditional partners remains the subject of intense speculation.
Much of it, like the frequent suggestion that Trump is somehow a Kremlin agent, or beholden to Putin, is without evidence.
Perhaps the right-wing US ideological fantasy that Russia is a natural US ally in a future confrontation with China, and can be broken away from its most important backer, is motivating Washington’s dramatic geopolitical shift.
But for many bewildered observers, both explanations for Trump’s extraordinary pivot to the Kremlin seem equally misplaced.
The usually strained, if not openly hostile, relationship between the US and Russia appears to be entering a new and radical phase.