How fraught is meeting with Russia? Ask GOP senators
WASHINGTON — Even for an era of strained relations, the images that crossed back over the Atlantic last week stood out: Seven Republican senators and one Republican congresswoman ushered into a Moscow conference room, exchanging pleasantries with top Russian officials on the eve of American Independence Day.
But if the delegation was intended to help thaw friction between the two countries before a summit meeting between their two leaders, its aftermath has shown just how treacherous diplomacy between Washington and Moscow has become amid Russia’s brazen aggression abroad.
In Moscow, the senators have been portrayed as anything from peacemakers to fools. Democrats in Washington were only slightly more generous.
“It is clear to me that there are members of the Senate who are either naive or they don’t recognize the real risk factors that Russia imposes on our system of government,” said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, D-MD., who led a report on Vladimir Putin’s tactical aggression in Europe this year.
Russian commentators and officials, meanwhile, claimed the senators’ overtures were evidence that the tide of U.s.-russian relations were, in fact, moving toward the Kremlin just as President Donald Trump prepared to meet privately with Putin, the Russian president.
“The wind is blowing in our sails,” Vyacheslav Nikonov, the chairman of the State Duma education committee, told a Russian state television talk show after meeting with the delegation.
The multiday trip, with stops in St. Petersburg and Moscow, amounted to the most senior congressional exchange between the two countries in years, and the first since the Russians undertook an unprecedented and consequential campaign to bolster Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and harm Hillary Clinton’s.
That interference remains the subject of high-stakes investigations in the United States, and it loomed over the trip. On the same day the senators met with officials in Moscow, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report confirming that conclusions reached by U.S. intelligence agencies — that Putin ordered a campaign to sow American political divisions, harm Clinton and aid Trump — were “sound.” Its release was intended to drive home that Russia is still active in American politics, using digital tools to deepen the country’s