Russia has built its wartime identity around rupture with the West. Yet whenever it needs proof of its own relevance, it still searches for Western faces. This year’s St. Petersburg Economic Forum became exactly that kind of stage — less economic than psychological.
For years, the Kremlin has spoken of liberal decline, sanctions aggression, Washington’s hostility and the need to rely on Russia’s own resources. But alongside those slogans came Candace Owens, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., Andrew Tate and Steven Seagal — different in status, but equally useful to Moscow’s optics.
This is not the return of the West to Russia. It is the selection of those Western fragments that can be used as evidence that Moscow is not isolated and that the West is not monolithic. The Kremlin does not need mainstream institutions. It needs people whose presence lets it tell domestic audiences: Americans still come.
According to Daycom’s assessment, the St. Petersburg forum is turning from an investment venue into a theater of ideological selection. Russia can no longer fully bring back Western capital, but it can host Western guests who are already in conflict with their own political, media or cultural environments.
Candace Owens was almost an ideal figure for the Russian stage. The American right-wing commentator speaks a language Moscow understands well: suspicion of the media, hostility toward liberal elites, fatigue with support for Ukraine, and appeals to family, faith and the “shared problems” of East and West.
In St. Petersburg, she was treated not as an ordinary panelist, but as a symbolic guest. Russian state media carefully amplified her remarks about Moscow being clean and orderly, about Americans supposedly tiring of Ukraine, and about the similarities between Russians and Americans. The fact of American praise mattered more than its content.
Owens appeared on a panel about large families, parenthood and career success. For the Kremlin, that theme is not accidental. The Russian state has long used the language of “traditional values” as a political weapon — against feminism, liberalism, LGBT rights, Western secularism and anything it can frame as moral decay.
Rodney Mims Cook Jr. played a different role. He is not a major political figure, but he carries the status of an American official connected to cultural and architectural projects in Washington. For Moscow, that is enough: even a modest official title can be turned into a symbol of restored dialogue.
His appearance on a panel about Russian-American cultural ties allowed the Kremlin to stage a convenient dream: politics may be blocked, but culture and sport can melt the “ice” between the two countries. Hence the ideas of a hockey match, ballet in New York, and Russian performances in Trump’s planned White House ballroom or beneath a proposed triumphal arch.
Those proposals sound soft, almost innocent. Their function is political. Cultural exchange, in this construction, becomes not a neutral gesture but a way to bypass the war, sanctions, Ukraine, repression and accountability. Moscow wants to begin with ballet so it does not have to begin with Bucha, Mariupol or missiles over Kyiv.
This is where the split inside the Russian elite becomes visible. Security hard-liners speak the language of fortress Russia, purification from Western influence and struggle against an enemy. Technocrats, cultural managers and parts of the business class still want at least partial channels to the West — not necessarily political reconciliation, but access to prestige, markets and symbols.
The forum showed how those two impulses coexist. On one side, Russia displays resilience under sanctions, a turn toward Asia and the Middle East, self-sufficiency and defiance of the West. On the other, packed rooms for American guests, intense state media attention and a visible hunger to hear something resembling approval.
That is not so much strength as a craving for recognition. A state that speaks daily of independence from the West carefully elevates any Western guest willing to say that Russia is not what it is portrayed to be. The war has not destroyed Russia’s desire to be seen by the West. It has made that desire more selective and more aggressive.
Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan fit this picture in cruder form. Their arrival in Moscow with a folk-style welcome looked like a caricature of Russian hospitality toward controversial Western figures. Tate is not a politician, a diplomatic channel or a business bridge. He is a media symbol of aggressive masculinity, conflict with Western norms and confrontation with legal institutions.
That is why even some Russian right-wing voices reacted with irritation. In their logic, the country is supposed to be freeing itself from worship of the West, yet it stages ceremonial welcomes for Western provocateurs. The contradiction is exposed: Russia wants to be anti-Western, but it does not want to be ignored by the West.
Steven Seagal has long served a different function — an old decorative bridge between Hollywood and the Kremlin. His presence no longer surprises, but it remains useful to Russia’s political theater. He proves that one can have an American past, a Russian passport and full loyalty to Putin’s version of the world.
Together, these figures form the new Western periphery of Russian diplomacy. They are not presidents, corporate chiefs, major investors or leading universities. They are influencers, cultural intermediaries, faded celebrities, conservative activists and personal brands who come to Russia not for a market, but for a stage.
For the Kremlin, that is enough for now. The domestic viewer sees Americans in St. Petersburg and hears words about shared values, family, culture, sport and fatigue with Ukraine. The reality of sanctions, the absence of a serious business breakthrough and the coldness of official Washington can be pushed into the background.
But the limits of this strategy are obvious. Russia is not restoring full ties with the West. It is collecting fragments of the West that can be assembled into a propaganda image. That can create the appearance of international reach, but it does not restore trust, investment, technology or normal political relations.
The St. Petersburg forum was meant to show that Russia can live despite isolation. Instead, it showed how difficult it is for Russia to live without a Western mirror. The Kremlin may rail against the West, but it still needs Western voices to tell it what it wants to hear.
That is the central paradox of today’s Russia. It has declared war on the Western order, yet seeks validation from Western dissidents of that order. It rejects the “collective West,” but applauds individual Americans when they help it look less alone. The louder Moscow speaks of self-sufficiency, the more visible its need for someone else’s approval becomes.
