Russian media saw today's highly anticipated summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as a heartening step forward, with the Kremlin leader as the more prominent figure.
After the leaders' joint news conference in Helsinki, Russia media also took some swipes at American journalists for their purported obsession with Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election that brought Trump to power.
"To me, it's the only question that interests the American press," reporter Yegor Kolyvanov said on NTV, a Kremlin-controlled national TV channel.
"Putin assured the entire world that he did not interfere," declared Olga Skabeyeva on state channel Rossiya-1.
The channel's report gave clear precedence to Putin, running lengthy excerpts of his comments at the news conference, with fewer, shorter soundbites from Trump.
If tangible results from the meeting were thin, the ceremony of it and the civil atmosphere between the two world leaders received considerable attention, and was interpreted as a move toward improving the soured relations between Washington and Moscow.
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"'I saw two leaders today who can agree with each other," Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign affairs committee of Russia's upper house of parliament, said on Rossiya-1.
The meeting "plays a great role not only in adjusting and restoring normal political dialogue, this meeting also has great meaning for peace, for stability in the world," upper house speaker Valentina Matvienko told journalists.
Their reactions were in line with what the Russian media said in the hours before the meeting.
Russia's largely Kremlin-friendly TV networks, websites and newspapers portrayed Trump as a political maverick who is being unfairly targeted by his own compatriots.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper dismissed the US investigation into Trump's "mythical work for the Kremlin," and praised Trump for meeting Putin "despite opposition from his own elite and the hysterics of the media."