Russians, Saudis look to spruce up relations
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi King Salman reached around their differences to sign lucrative agreements and improve relations, but the differences are still there.
The Saudi king’s visit to Russia this week was an event Moscow has been anticipating for many years. Amid recent years' flurry of visits by Middle Eastern leaders, the Saudi monarch arguably had been the only one missing. So when he eventually came on Oct. 4, the king “received a czar-level reception,” wrote Andrey Kolesnikov, a Russian journalist of the Kommersant newspaper who's been covering Vladimir Putin's presidency for many years.
In Kolesnikov's view, not only was the trip historic in that it was the first state visit to Russia by a sitting Saudi monarch, but it was also “unprecedented in that the big Kremlin Palace where [the meeting] took place on Oct. 5 needed a light reconstruction to meet the demand of the Saudi party to make possible the king’s movement in a special electric car around the palace.”
“It wasn’t difficult [on the engineering side] but was done as a sign of respect to the king," Kolesnikov observed.
The visit, however, didn't get off to an easy start. In the Vnukovo Airport, the king was met by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin — a representative not of the level one would expect for a visit of this caliber. What detail-picky journalists found even more remarkable was that under his coat, Rogozin was wearing a blazer — a weird outfit to welcome royalty — and walked by the king on his way to the limousine, which is also an extraordinary protocol oversight. Given Rogozin’s duties of coordinating operations of the Russian military-industrial complex, his presence as the welcoming official could be seen as a reminder to the Saudis of Russia's growing military presence in Syria and of the multibillion-dollar contracts Russia was about to sign to sell the Saudis Russian weaponry. These two themes played loudly all during the visit.
