Officially, the Kremlin line is that Russia simply does not care about the findings of the Mueller report. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Shortly before its much-anticipated public release, a Kremlin spokesman told CNN the subject was of no real interest. Russia, he added, had more important matters on which to concentrate.
But the 400 heavily redacted pages of the Mueller report will, doubtlessly, be pored over in great detail here in Moscow.
The report did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump or any of his associates and the Russian government, but it firmly underlined alleged Russian efforts to meddle in US politics.
Even the Trump-appointed US Attorney General, William Barr, made no attempt to nuance the damaging central findings of the 22-month long Mueller probe.
Namely, that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election through a disinformation campaign to sow discord in America, conducted by a Kremlin-backed troll factory – the Internet Research Agency – located in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.
Barr also gave a full endorsement of Mueller’s indictment against Russian hackers, accepting that members of Russia’s main military intelligence agency, the GRU, stole Democratic Party emails that were later published in an attempt to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 Democratic Party opponent.
Russia, of course, categorically denies any wrongdoing, rejecting allegations of interference as an anti-Russian witch hunt.
But Moscow has already been heavily sanctioned by the US over this and is bracing itself for even stronger measures as the US Congress considers how to ratchet up the punishment and to deter Russia from future meddling.
President Donald Trump is also far from in the clear.
Firstly, he has never fully accepted the idea that Russia meddled in his election victory, even questioning the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies, notoriously, while standing next to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, at their Helsinki summit last year.
Over the years, Trump has speculated the hackers could have been Chinese, or even some random person “sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”.
He may now be forced to admit Russia played a role in his win.
Secondly, if there was no collusion with Russia, why was candidate Trump so plainly accommodating to Russian interests, so soft on a Kremlin strongman who presides over such an autocratic and international law-violating state?
Is it blind admiration of power? Does the Kremlin have Kompromat on Trump after all? The fundamental questions about Trump’s inexplicable affinity for the Kremlin remains unanswered.
As the Mueller report was finally released to the public, albeit in redacted form, Trump tweeted the words “GAME OVER”.
In fact, this game, or least this phase of it, may have only just begun.
CNN’s Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.