Moscow: Russian newspapers today paid scant attention to Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential election, focusing instead on a state-of-the-nation speech by President Dmitry Medvedev.
The US election story was given secondary status by several major dailies, with mostly a purely factual recounting of the results of the election and gloomy assessments on the future of US-Russia relations.
Greater attention was given to the Kremlin leader's speech calling for constitutional reforms that would extend the presidential mandate and came out with strong rhetoric against the United States.
The Izvestia daily was one of the newspapers to give Obama's victory greater prominence.
"Obama's victory would be unthinkable and impossible without the active role of all the good forces in America - above all its young people and its intellectual elite - independently of the colour of their skin," wrote its correspondent Melor Sturua.
Writing in the Kommersant newspaper, Andrei Fyodorov, a former foreign minister, hailed a historic victory but said Obama faced an uphill task since "his international experience is not that great yet."
"US-Russia relations have every chance of improving a little but not because of their views getting any closer but rather because of greater forced pragmatism in the approaches taken by both sides," Fyodorov wrote.
