Putin Weighs Tillerson Meeting

Russia Bashes Orangutan Policy as Putin Weighs Tillerson Meeting

By Nick Wadhams and Henry Meyer

Russia pushed back against demands that it abandon Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad over a chemical-weapons attack as the Kremlin said President Vlady Putin is likely to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Putin complained that relations with the U.S. are worse than under President Barack Obama, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticized the Trump administration’s “ambiguous and contradictory” foreign policy at the start of talks with Tillerson in Moscow Wednesday.

There’s a “probability” that Putin and Tillerson will meet if the talks between the two top diplomats show a need to “report to the head of state,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. It’s “quite absurd” to demand that Russia abandon Assad as this would mean ending support for his forces that are fighting against Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria, Peskov said.

The first visit to Moscow by a senior Trump administration official is taking place amid heightened tensions after the U.S. accused the Assad government of a chemical-weapons attack in Idlib province. Trump ordered an airstrike with 59 cruise missiles on a Syrian airbase last week in response, while the U.S. has accused Russia of covering up the atrocity. The U.S. and its allies are trying to increase pressure on Russia to end its support for Assad, which has been crucial in keeping the regime in power after six years of civil war.

The Moscow meeting will “further clarify areas of sharp difference so that we can better understand why these differences exist and what prospects for narrowing those differences may be,” Tillerson told Lavrov.

Trust ‘Deteriorated’

Trust between Russia and the U.S. under Trump “at the working level, especially at the military level, hasn’t improved; rather it’s deteriorated,” Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript published Wednesday of an interview with the Mir TV channel.

Russian relations with the U.S. all but broke down with the Obama administration amid friction over Syria and the conflict in Ukraine. While Russia had high hopes of a new era of cooperation after Trump repeatedly praised Putin during the campaign, tensions have spiralled over the Syrian crisis.

Tillerson said Tuesday that Putin’s government has aligned itself with an “unreliable partner” in Assad, whose reign is coming to an end. The Syrian conflict has become enmeshed with the battle against Islamic State and drawn in the U.S., Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as multiple extremist groups and militias backed by regional powers such as Saudi Arabia.

Russia saw “some very troubling actions” in Syria by the U.S. and “we believe it’s fundamentally important not to let these actions happen again in the future,” Lavrov said. While Russia’s “heard a lot of things from Washington regarding the current state and outlook” for relations, it’s ready for dialogue with the U.S. on an “equal footing,” he said.

Chemical Weapons

Accusing Russia of spreading disinformation, officials in Washington on Tuesday published a four-page document that they said contained evidence of the chemical-weapons attack including satellite images, reports from the scene and details of exposure gathered from victims. The U.S. “is confident that the Syrian regime conducted a chemical weapons attack, using the nerve agent sarin, against its own people,” according to the document.

The Syrian government met its obligations to destroy chemical weapons “as far as we know” under a 2013 agreement brokered by Russia and the U.S., Putin said in the Mir interview. “If any doubts have appeared, then it’s possible to carry out checks” by international investigators, said Putin, who’s compared the U.S. accusations to the faulty intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Putin has built his reputation on never conceding to any public pressure,” said Gleb Kuznetsov, a political expert and consultant to the Kremlin on domestic policies. “An ultimatum will lead to Putin strengthening his support for Assad and this will intensify the Syrian conflict, turning it into a conflict between the West and Russia.”

Russia has “absolutely reliable information” that the Idlib incident happened after Syrian SU-22 jets struck a store controlled by terrorists for manufacturing chemical weapons to be used in Syria and Iraq, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday.
“We see, in response, efforts to promote already established conclusions of an accusatory nature which our colleagues from the U.S. and Western countries are pushing,” he said.