The United States and Russia are mending fences on the diplomatic front: Kirill Dmitriev, a senior Kremlin adviser and the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, is now in Washington to advance talks on Ukraine, the first time a senior Russian official has visited the US capital since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
But the fast-moving situation has created cognitive dissonance in Moscow. President Donald Trump's apparent frustration with the progress of peace talks on Ukraine has now bubbled to the surface and the US leader has abruptly tilted his rhetoric against Putin.
On March 30, Trump phoned Kristen Welker of NBC News to relay his frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling Welker he was "very angry, pissed off" with the Kremlin chief for questioning the credibility of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press briefing on April 1 that Trump "is frustrated with leaders on both sides of this war." Still, the US president's remarks were a major shift in tone.
Trump -- who rarely speaks of Putin in unflattering terms -- has primarily reserved his ire for the Ukrainian president, whether calling him a "dictator" or giving him a public scolding in the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, a segment aired on March 31 during the evening news program Vesti on Russia's Rossiya-1 state television that suggested a hidden political agenda by NBC News in reporting Trump's comments.
"In order to somehow balance the intense pressure on Ukraine, the sympathetic-to-Zelenskyy TV channel NBC News even managed to extract a quote from Trump about his alleged anger toward Putin," the presenter said.
TV presenter and propagandist Yevgeny Popov took a slightly different tack, suggesting Trump was simply diverting domestic attention away from the uproar over the administration's inadvertent sharing of war plans with a journalist in a group chat on the commercial app Signal.
"No need to be surprised," Popov said.
"The resident of the White House is trying to drown out the scandal around the leak of information about strikes on the Huthis through the Signal messaging app."
Such messaging, however, is a departure from the celebratory tone on Russian state TV that followed the dust-up in the Oval Office with Zelenskyy. And Trump's promises to take a harder line with Putin if Russia fails to deliver on promises may temper some expectations of a grand rapprochement with the United States.
To be sure, parsing remarks made on Russian state media is an imperfect way to gauge the prospects for US-Russia relations or Putin's willingness to strike a deal with Trump. Russian state media are generally seen as a reliable barometer of what Putin is thinking and relay the Kremlin's daily talking points to the Russian public, but Putin himself sits atop a closed decision-making apparatus.
Perhaps more telling than the spin about Trump on Russian state television is the stream of vitriol being directed at Europe by some of the Kremlin's top propagandists, particularly as European nations close ranks.
In remarks that followed the US-Russia deal to halt the use of military force in the Black Sea, TV host and arch-propagandist Vladimir Solovyov gloated that the "godless" Europeans did not have a place at the talks in Riyadh.
"For Trump, Putin is completely understandable: the leader of a nation close in his fundamental values and set of basic values. Who is confronting him?" Solovyov said.
"For Trump, Europe is an enemy."
In a recent interview on CNN, Russian nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin also took aim at Europe, speculating, "If for example Trump would withdraw the United States from the war against us in Ukraine, there could be a situation where we fight against European globalists, European liberals in Ukraine without America."
One might question the wisdom of giving a platform to a man known for genocidal rhetoric (disclosure: the author previously worked for CNN), but the upshot was clear.
Russian propaganda has fixed on Europe as a threat, particularly amid talk of a "willing" coalition to support Ukraine or even send peacekeepers.
The phrase "popping champagne in Moscow" has become a popular shorthand for US policymaking decisions that appear to favor Putin.
It's perhaps an unconscious reference to the moment when firebrand Russian ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky hoisted glasses of Abrau-Durso sparkling wine to celebrate the 2016 election victory of Trump.
But there is, as yet, no garish photo opportunity that Russian state television can now show to explain the conflicting signals from Washington.
