Kremlin officials have adopted a remarkably benign public attitude toward US President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, which included a speech at an Arab Islamic American Summit denouncing Iran, meetings with Saudi and other regional leaders, and an agreement to sell $110 billion in advanced weapons to the kingdom. Nevertheless, their private views may be less sanguine.

Referring to the arms deal, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “I will leave this without comment.” Neither Putin nor Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have mentioned Trump’s trip, although Putin highlighted Moscow’s cooperation with Riyadh in maintaining stable global oil prices shortly beforehand. Notably, however, Russia’s Security Council met a few days later, while Trump was in Europe, and “discussed the ongoing operation of the Russian Aerospace Forces in Syria in the context of international developments.” This bland phrasing appears to refer to a conversation about the implications for Moscow of Trump’s visit.

Andrey Sushentsov, the head of the Moscow-based consulting agency Foreign Policy Advisory Group and a program director at the Valdai Discussion Club, explained Russian officials’ outwardly calm attitude by highlighting the continuity in US policy toward Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. As Sushentsov told Al-Monitor, “Moscow does not see the Trump visit to Saudi Arabia as a deviation from the previous course on support of Gulf monarchies against Iran in regional affairs.” Perhaps more important, Sushentsov added, Moscow sees limited prospects for Trump’s outreach to Riyadh and others, predicting that “the Trump administration would refrain from embedding itself in a large-scale confrontation with Tehran that would imply anything other than supply of weapons.” From this perspective, he concluded, “observers in Moscow believe that the Trump administration needs a few ‘good deals’ abroad to project its image as a ‘winner’ inside the country, where opposition has effectively paralyzed the current administration.”

Still, the fact that senior officials have avoided public comments about Trump’s highly visible effort to engage with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies does not mean that Moscow has been silent on the matter. Russia’s internationally-oriented state media — especially Sputnik News — have expressed wide-ranging skepticism about the trip. In a spate of articles published shortly after Trump left Saudi Arabia, Sputnik quoted a “former European Union consultant” who argued that the trip was a “major public relations success” but was unlikely to produce meaningful new cooperation against terrorism. Sputnik also cited other European academics and experts arguing that the effort would backfire because Saudi Arabia is despised and isolated among Arabs and Muslims, and it quoted a US expert predicting that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “could now become more aggressive than ever” in response to Trump’s outreach to Riyadh. On top of this, Sputnik reported on US Sen. Rand Paul’s introduction of a resolution disapproving of the arms sale, describing Paul’s concerns over Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and repeating Amnesty International charges that US weapons are contributing to Saudi human rights violations.