Putin will sit at an even bigger table when traveling abroad than in Kremlin | Abroad

Putin was in turmoil early this year when he hosted several Western leaders in the Kremlin at an excessively long white table. Both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suffered that fate after they refused to take a corona test. The memes couldn’t keep up.

This week, the Russian president went abroad for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine. He attended the sixth Caspian Summit in Turkmenistan, a meeting between the leaders of all states bordering the Caspian Sea: Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

In doing so, he ended up at an even gigantic table than that of the Kremlin. The heads of government were so far from each other in the ‘large meeting room’ that they are barely recognizable in photos of the meeting.

Before that meeting, there had been a slightly more “intimate” meeting in what the Turkmen foreign ministry called the “small meeting room” of the luxurious Arkadag Hotel in Ashgabat. But that table had also been thoroughly washed out.

The first photo quickly made its way to social media, where it was compared to the much smaller conference table at the G7 major industrialized nations that had taken place in Germany the days before. ‘Huh? On the left the top of the G7 with nine people at the table. On the right the Caspian Summit with Putin. There are five people at the table. Why are they so far apart?’, one writes.

“Putin gets a bigger table every week,” wrote someone else.