‘Joint cyber unit will take time’

Washington, july 10: A joint Russian-U.S. working group on cyber security, proposed by President Vladimir Putin in a discussion with US President Donald Trump in Hamburg, is unlikely to be launched any time soon, a Russian official said on Monday.

“President Putin proposed forming a working group. This does not mean that it should start working immediately, virtually tomorrow,” Svetlana Lukash, a Russian official at the G-20 summit held in Germany last week, told a news conference.

“Nobody, except the participants of that (Hamburg) meeting, knows how that proposal was formulated and how President Trump reacted,” Ms Lukash said.

She said that some media reports may have prejudged that creating a joint commission on cyber security was a decided matter already.

“That was a proposal. Probably, he (Trump) is not ready yet for this specific initiative at this stage,” she said. “But this does not mean that there won’t be cooperation between the two nations in this sphere in any form which suits them both.”

Mr Trump argued for a rapprochement with Moscow in his campaign but has been unable to deliver because his administration has been dogged by investigations into the allegations of Russian interference in the election and ties with his campaign.

Mr Putin and Me Trump discussed cyber security for no less than 40 minutes in Hamburg, Ms Lukash said. She did not rule out that, a joint cyber security commission could be either a US-Russian bilateral unit or a UN-sponsored effort.