Kremlin agrees with Trump that bilateral ties ‘at very dangerous low’
The Kremlin on Friday said it agreed with President Donald Trump’s assessment that US-Russian ties were at an all-time and very dangerous low.
“We fully share this opinion,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists over Trump’s view, expressed on Twitter on Thursday.
Peskov said that the danger facing the countries “may lie in a lack of mutual collaboration and cooperation over the topics that are vitally important for both our countries and their people.”
Trump, writing after he reluctantly signed a bill approved by Congress for strengthening sanctions against Russia, tweeted: “Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low.
“You can thank Congress, the same people that can’t even give us HCare!”, Trump said, referring to the Republican-dominated legislature’s failure to implement a campaign pledge to change the US healthcare system.
The US Congress overwhelmingly approved the legislation last week, passing a measure that conflicts with the Republican president’s desire to improve relations with Moscow.
Trump signed the bill behind closed doors. And later he criticized the measure as infringing on his powers to shape foreign policy, and said he could make “far better deals” with governments than Congress can.
Moscow has reacted furiously to the sanctions.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev On Wednesday said they amounted to a “full-fledged economic war” and demonstrated Trump’s “total weakness by handing over executive power to Congress in the most humiliating way.”
The Kremlin spokesman on Friday also slammed the ongoing investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the election campaign, calling this “Russia gate,” a reference to the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.
“We have many times talked about the complete absurdity and lack of basis for so-called Russiagate,” Peskov said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is set to meet US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Manila during the weekend to discuss bilateral ties, the Russian foreign ministry confirmed Thursday after the diplomatic chiefs spoke by phone.