3 min read

Are Russians on the Trump Train?

Are Russians on the Trump Train?

U.S. President Trump and Russian President Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska last Friday, August 15th. The coverage from Western media represented the full range of emotions and was understandably voluminous, a trend that has continued as Ukrainian President Zelenskyy came to Washington with European, EU, and NATO leaders earlier this week. 

But how did Russian media cover the Alaska meeting? And how do online conversations suggest Russians are feeling about Trump in the wake of the increased White House focus? 

Using a diverse set of Russian-language sources, FilterLabs.org, our newly established nonprofit arm (exciting update to come!), was able to gather several key takeaways from Russia. 

  • Sentiment towards Trump shifted in a positive direction in traditional Russian news and social media circles before, during, and immediately after the meeting in Alaska. Notably, sentiment across both data types was tracking closely until Special Envoy Witkoff’s trip to Moscow; while both trended positive subsequent to his trip, it is at this early August point that a clear divide between news and social media begins to emerge.
  • Russian news sources heavily quoted Trump after the meeting (especially the 10/10 rating he gave), highlighted the promise of additional meetings, were weirdly fixated on the body language of the two leaders (which one far right outlet called “warm and friendly” while “Kyiv supporters [upon seeing the greeting] immediately became very nervous”), and were fascinated by the fact that Putin gifted a Ural motorcycle to an Alaskan. 
  • With Post-Witkoff meeting enthusiasm and parroting of official narratives, overall sentiment trends on Russian social media were also positive. However, while a vocal minority hoped for peace, sentiment on social media was on the whole more negative (or, more accurately, less positive), due to a number of factors—most of which were entirely absent from Russian news coverage:
    • The undulating realities of dealing with Washington. Several memes circulated showing charts flowing up and down and captions like “Donald will solve everything” then “dumb Pindosy [derogatory term for Americans]” then “Trump is our elephant” then “let’s nuke Washington” then “let’s visit Washington”.
    • Deep skepticism that the meeting will accomplish anything. Before the meeting, one user posted “doubt anything will happen, no trust toward either of them,” while another asked “how many meetings have they had so far? And what happened exactly?” After the meeting, many (outside of Z-channels—see below) were unsurprised at the lack of progress but nevertheless upset. One comment under a post about Trump announcing that no agreement had been reached asked “And what, should our boys continue to die?”
    • The distraction theory. A common thread on social media was that Trump is infusing himself into the conflict with Ukraine to distract from issues he is facing domestically (e.g., Epstein).
  • An interesting platform-related divide also emerged in social media. General Telegram users (who tend to be in the middle of the age curve: not too elderly and not too young) displayed the full range of emotions discussed above. However, the “Z-channel” subset (which tends to be dominated by late 20- to 40-year old nationalistic voices, and where users are more scared that Putin will make a deal unfavorable to Russia and are convinced that Russia will never achieve its goals with the West as mediator) was much more unified in the belief that the ostensibly null result of the Alaska meeting was a resounding success because it perpetuates what is, in their minds, a positive status quo.

So were Russians on the Trump Train after Alaska? If you were only looking at Russian news sources, you might assume the answer to be yes. But when we look into Telegram, Z-channels, and other social media sources, clearly the picture is much more complicated. We'll keep watching to see if (and how) the Zelenskyy meeting impacts the Russian information environment.

FilterLabs.org is a recently established nonprofit partner of FilterLabs.AI that focuses on providing continued high-quality data and sentiment analysis from hard-to-reach places. Formal announcement coming soon, including exciting things in store for FilterLabs.AI.