President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social site a picture of the Moon with an American flag, captioned “The Moon is Ours.”

At the UN noon briefing on Sept. 8, a correspondent put it directly to the Secretary-General’s spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric: “President Trump has claimed that the moon belongs to the United States. Does it?”

Dujarric responded without replying directly. “We believe in the peaceful uses of outer space,” he said. “And I will leave it at that.”

Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov chose to respond to the post as enthusiasm rather than a territorial claim. “When President Trump said, ‘The moon is ours,’ I think he didn’t mean that it was their property, but he meant the hope that American astronauts would set foot on the moon very soon,” Peskov said at a briefing on September 8.

Peskov’s is the charitable reading, and it is also the only one compatible with the law. Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which the United States is a party, provides that outer space, “including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” The treaty further requires that exploration and use of space be carried out “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.”