Pavel K. Baev
Moscow’s muted response to the October 10 announcement of Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize win and the ceasefire in Gaza underline how Russia’s war against Ukraine has come to dominate the Kremlin’s attention.
Recent independent polling by the Levada Center shows a desire for a conclusion to the war against Ukraine among the Russian public. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, has shown no flexibility in curtailing his maximalist aims.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently discussed the potential supply of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, which Moscow fears could force it to compromise on its war aims.
Extraordinary international attention was focused on the Nobel Peace Prize announcement on October 10. Anxiety was palpable in Moscow, where official skepticism had dominated since the award of the 2022 prize to the Memorial Society—a Russian human rights organization that was branded as a “foreign agent” and forced to operate outside the country. Mainstream Russian commentators were eager to speculate about the potential awarding of the prize to U.S. President Donald Trump (Izvestiya, October 8; Kommersant, October 9). Russian President Vladimir Putin, while asserting that the Nobel Prize had lost its reputation, however, expressed the opinion that Trump deserved it, which earned him a word of gratitude from the U.S. president (RBC, October 10).
The official announcement that the Nobel Prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado, a leader of the Venezuelan opposition, was met in Moscow with indifference. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro may be Russia’s strategic partner, but his support for the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine is worth very little (Rossiiskaya Gazeta, October 3). Similarly, the breakthrough in stopping the war in Gaza is receiving only superficial coverage in the Russian media (Izvestiya, October 10). Moscow has discontinued its attempts to form ties with the Hamas leadership, and after the fall of its key regional ally, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, Russia’s interest in the Middle East has somewhat dissipated (see EDM, February 6, June 16, October 6; Forbes.ru, October 9).
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