I think, this article sums up the geopolitical context of the meeting very well. Was the meeting a mistake on the part of His Holiness? I don't think so, and this is why.
While Patriarch Kirill is rightly characterized as a political leader and a functionary of Putinist government, our Pope is a prelate of the Church seeking to strengthen the Church. In that task, Pope Francis succeeded: the joint declaration does not say anything the Catholic Church hasn't been saying for decades now with respect to the Eastern Orthodox, yet there are parts of the Declaration that are very hard to swallow for the Russian Orthodox. Especially, that is the references to the common and fraternal witness of the realities of the first millennium of Christendom that is already causing many in the Russian blogosphere to condemn Kirill as traitor of Orthodoxy. The Russian Orthodox, by and large, do not subscribe to this sense of commonality of faith.
So that is what Rome gained from the meeting: another step for the inevitable eventual reunification.
In the near term, and from the foreign politics viewpoint I agree with Shiropaev: Kirill gave Putin some undeserved breathing room.
“So that is what Rome gained from the meeting: another step for the inevitable eventual reunification”
We won’t live to see it; our children’s children won’t live to see it. In the 1440s Rome and the Eastern hierarchs thought they had a union, but the Orthodox people said ANAXIOS, and that was the end of that. The same thing will happen again, not just in Russia, but across the Orthodox world. We are, as you know my brother, notorious for telling our hierarchs precisely where to put such of their notions as we disapprove of...and submission to the pope of Rome is one of those notions.
Certainly we can work together, probably more closely than with anyone else, but no union.