Obama in Moscow: A Cool Reception, and a Dose of Putin

President Barack Obama employed his signature moves -- the candid town hall address; the glamorous wife and daughters -- and to be sure Russian President Dmitry Medvedev seemed to lap it up. But in the end Russia is not Cairo, nor Berlin. This is not 1994, when then-President Bill Clinton led some Moscow women to swoon. In place of the intrigued, still-fascinated eyes of the 1990s, Obama was met largely with disinterest from the Russian public, and the wagging finger of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in private. In short, he fell flat.

That's a dose of reality. In the best of times, on most topics, the best that can be expected in a U.S.-Russia relationship is probably respectful disagreement.

“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” 25-year-old Kirill Zagorodnov, a student at Moscow's New Economic School, told Clifford Levy and Ellen Barry of The New York Times. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”

Stefan Wagstyl of the Financial Times heard the same story from the students he collared after Obama's speech at the school yesterday. But Nikolai Petrov of Moscow's Carnegie Center also cautioned Wagstyl not to go too far with his analysis: "These students are not typical. They are mostly mathematics specialists," Petrov said.

While this slap of reality was telling, probably the most important meeting of Obama's Moscow trip was his two-hour breakfast with Putin. By Wagstyl's description, it appears that Putin put on one of his bravura performances. Putin has been wowing Westerners for years with his three-hour, no-notes discourses on Russian affairs at the annual Valdai Discussion Club. Now Obama got a taste of Putin's presence of mind.

Obama's takeaway? Putin is "tough, smart, shrewd, very unsentimental, very pragmatic." And also in charge.