Tillerson talks tough on Russia.
KIEV, Ukraine — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson assured Ukraine’s leader on Sunday that the United States would not lift economic sanctions against Russia until it “reverses the actions” that prompted them and restores the country’s “territorial integrity,” appearing to set the same high bar for sanctions relief that the Obama administration did.
Tillerson’s strongly worded statement issued at a news conference in Kiev alongside Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, who took office after one of Putin’s acolytes was pushed from power, seemed to insist Moscow withdraw Russian troops and heavy weapons from eastern Ukraine and return Crimea, the Black Sea territory Russia annexed in 2014 — though Tillerson never specifically mentioned the disputed peninsula by name.
In a statement posted on Twitter minutes after Tillerson finished speaking, Trump wrote that “sanctions were not discussed in my meeting with President (Vladimir) Putin,” and added, “Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian & Syrian problems are solved!”
Political reality
Tillerson’s statement Sunday in Kiev was more definitive on the issue of sanctions than his boss’s tweet, perhaps a reflection of the political reality in Washington, where the Senate voted, 97-2, last month to toughen sanctions because of Russia’s continued intervention in eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s attempts to intimidate former Soviet states and the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
The administration has sought to water down the sanctions bill to give itself more leeway in dealing with Russia, an effort that was viewed by many Republicans and Democrats as a way to relax sanctions without congressional approval.
A few days ago, Tillerson announced he was appointing a new special envoy, Kurt Volker, to help settle the dispute in Ukraine in part at the request of Putin. And Russian officials believed they had made progress in Putin’s meeting with Trump.
Volker sat in the front row as Tillerson spoke Sunday, and he was to remain in Kiev after Tillerson departed to discuss how to enforce the largely ignored Minsk accord agreed in 2015 that envisioned a way out of the Ukraine impasse.
Turning to the future
Tillerson, who was the only other senior U.S. official in Trump’s meeting with the Russian president, declined to say whether Trump accepted Putin’s denials that Russia was involved in efforts to influence the 2016 election.
His Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told reporters after the meeting in Hamburg, Germany, that Trump had been persuaded by Putin’s arguments.
When pressed on the question, Tillerson used language he had used Friday night, calling the election hacks the “first topic for discussion.”
“In all candidness, we did not expect an answer other than the one we received,” he said Sunday. “And so I think that was about the way we expected the conversation to go.”
Trump has frequently expressed doubts about Russia’s involvement in hacking the servers of the Democratic National Committee and compromising the email accounts of prominent Democratic operatives, dismissing the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies as politicized in the Obama era.
“I don’t know if we will ever come to an agreement, obviously, with our Russian counterparts on that,” Tillerson said. “I think the important thing is how do we assure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The two sides last week in Hamburg announced a new effort focused on avoiding interference in elections and curbing cybersabotage, which Tillerson said will start modestly with discussions about “a framework under which we might begin to have agreement on how to deal with these very complex issues of cyberthreats, cybersecurity, cyberintrusions.”