Maria Zakharova says European leaders are telling on themselves when they try to link the cause of the protests to Russia: “Certain sections of the population are being denied the very right that their regimes claim to uphold — namely, the right to express their point of view. They do not have that opportunity. Everything that is happening there is, in essence, just decoration for what they call democracy. Accordingly, all of this keeps building up and building up, and then, so to speak, the gates, the doors, the barriers come off their hinges — the crowd bursts into the streets, smashing and wrecking things, letting off steam.”

Putin's envoy Dmitriev proposes to European business leaders "to a little bit rise up to their bureaucracies": "You have people, I'm sorry to say it, ransacking your businesses in France. In Europe, they break the windows of your stores. And you have high energy costs because of stupidity of decoupling from Russian energy. So we hope that at some point you sort of look at all of this and say, come on, let's have better bureaucrats. Let's have bureaucrats that defend our business interests."

FT: “A European Commission spokesperson said that ‘what is important is that we are sitting at the table, that we are able to present our position’. One European diplomat also applauded the Commission’s presence in the meetings, given their experience with previous crises. ‘If shit hits the fan, you want them to be there.’” The quality of European diplomacy is evident even in the wording.