RUSSIA PERSPECTIVE

Moscow watches Trump's ultimatum with the calculated detachment of a power profiting from every barrel at $150. Russian coverage doesn't dwell on the annihilation threat -- it focuses on Trump's threat to jail a journalist for revealing details of the Iran rescue operation. This framing is deliberate: by highlighting attacks on press freedom in the United States, Moscow relativizes its own practices. If Trump's America jails journalists, Putin's Russia is no longer the authoritarian exception Washington claims to fight. Oil at $150 is a windfall for the Russian budget, but state media don't celebrate openly. They prefer to insist on the instability of American leadership: a president who changes tone every hour, threatens to raze a civilization then calls a ceasefire 'significant.' For Moscow, the ultimatum demonstrates that America's war in Iran is what Russia's intervention in Ukraine never was in Washington's eyes: a war of choice, waged by presidential whim, without parliamentary oversight.