US Diplomacy Feeds Putin’s Sense of Self-Righteousness (The Jamestown Foundation)

President Vladimir Putin may have every reason to be satisfied with the visit of US Secretary of State John Kerry to Moscow last Thursday (March 24). Their meeting lasted no less than four hours, and prior to it, Kerry had a long and remarkably cheerful face-to-face conversation with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. According to observant journalists, the Kerry-Lavrov meeting produced a cozy atmosphere for the later talks in the Kremlin (Kommersant, March 24). Lavrov was positively jubilant about the fiasco of Western efforts to keep Russia in international isolation (Moskovsky Komsomolets, March 25). Indeed, just hours before Kerry’s arrival, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier held talks with Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev; and on Friday, March 25, it was the turn of Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni to come to Moscow (Kommersant, March 25). The question remains, however, whether this friendly engagement and proto-cooperation encourages Putin to stay on his best behavior—or whether the Russian leader simply concludes that the West will come begging for his help and self-restraint no matter what?

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