The main Russian media outlets are reporting the story of Donald Trump. Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya like they would any other scandal in a far-off country—barely at all.
Informal ties to the government and self-censorship are common among Russia’s major news organizations, so it’s not unusal for them all to run similar stories, and to all ignore or downplay certain stories that the government doesn’t want covered.
Generally, coverage consists of summaries of New York Times reporting with quotes from few Russian officials who have spoken on the matter.
Referring to Veselnitskaya, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told the state-run RIA Novosti, “We don’t know who that is. And, of course, we can’t keep track of the meetings of every Russian lawyer in other countries and outside our borders.”
The Russian News Agency TASS quoted Peskov as comparing the controversy to a soap opera and claiming, “there is no sense drawing us into such soap operas as we are not taking part or playing any roles in it.”
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told Izvestiya, the independent pro-government paper of record, that he reacted to the news of the meeting “with amazement, that Trump’s son is accused of communicating with her. To me this is by and large savagery. When a person communicates with a lawyer—how can that be a threat to someone?”
Much of the coverage also includes Veselnitskaya’s insistence that she has no connections to the Kremlin and was never in possession of nor offered anyone compromising information on Hillary Clinton.
The BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg has reported that Russian TV networks—where most Russians get their news—are ignoring the story completely.
Most Russians believe their government’s statements that they did not attempt to interfere with the American election, according to a January poll from the Levada Center. While 72 percent say the Russian government probably or definitely didn’t tamper in the American elections, just 12 percent say they probably or definitely did, with the rest undecided.
In the same poll, a plurality of Russians (46 percent) said they expected U.S.-Russian relations to improve somewhat or significantly because of Donald Trump’s election.
