Breakthrough elusive for U.S., Russia
Trump, Tillerson say relations at ‘low’ point following response to chemical attack in Syria
WASHINGTON — Laying bare deep and dangerous divisions on Syria and other issues, President Donald Trump declared Wednesday that U.S. relations with Russia “may be at an all-time low.” His top diplomat offered a similarly grim assessment from the other side of the globe after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
“Right now we’re not getting along with Russia at all,” Mr. Trump said flatly during a White House news conference. It was stark evidence that the president is moving ever further from his campaign promises to establish better ties with Moscow.
Only weeks ago, it appeared that Mr. Trump, who praised Mr. Putin throughout the U.S. election campaign, was poised for a potentially historic rapprochement with Russia. But any such expectations have crashed into reality amid the nasty back-and-forth over Syria and ongoing U.S. investigations into Russia’s alleged interference in America’s U.S. presidential election.
“It’d be a fantastic thing if we got
along with Mr. Putin and if we got along with Russia,” Mr. Trump said. But he wasn’t seen as counting on it.
“That could happen, and it may not happen,” he said. “It may be just the opposite.”
Not long before Mr. Trump
spoke in Washington, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson struck a similar tone after an almost two-hour meeting with Mr. Putin that failed to bridge disputes over last week’s poison gas attack in Syria and other key issues such as the conflict in Ukraine, saying the two countries had reached a “low point” in relations.
“There is a low level of trust between our two countries,” Mr. Tillerson told reporters in Moscow after he and his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, shook hands for the cameras but did not smile and appeared unhappy with one another. “The world’s two primary nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship.”
Only minutes earlier, Mr. Lavrov, had claimed the two countries agreed work together on a probe of the April 4 chemical weapons attack in northern Syria that prompted retaliatory American missile strikes. Washington blames Russia’s ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad — whom Mr. Trump characterized as an “animal” on Wednesday — while Moscow has made it clear that Mr. Putin will not abandon Assad says Syrian rebels are responsible.
But R.C. Hammond, a senior Tillerson aide, said flatly: “No agreements were reached” after three hours of talks with Mr. Lavrov.
Mr. Lavrov began their meeting Wednesday by demanding to know America’s “real intentions.”
Later, Mr. Lavrov said that “we understand each other better” and he saw “many prospects for cooperation,” including a possible resumption of arms control talks.
Mr. Lavrov said Moscow would put “back in force” a telephone hotline used to keep U.S. and Russian warplanes from colliding or accidentally firing at one another in the crowded skies over Syria. Russian officials said last week they would suspend the hotline.
Mr. Lavrov also said the two governments had agreed to appoint special envoys to conduct what he called “a pragmatic conversation about the irritants, so to speak, that have piled up in our relationship under the Obama administration.”
Mr. Putin also warned of worsening ties in a TV interview in Moscow.
“You can say that the level of trust on a working level, especially on the military side, has not improved but most likely worsened” since last week’s U.S. airstrike in Syria, Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin.
He and his officials dismissed U.S. evidence that Assad had carried out the attack, and then Mr. Putin added a bombshell prediction of his own: Unnamed forces were going to carry out more chemical weapons attacks and blame it on Assad.
Mr. Trump, who last week ordered airstrikes on a Syrian air base in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack, was asked Wednesday if Syria could have launched the attack without Russia’s knowledge. Mr. Trump said it was “certainly possible” though “probably unlikely.”
“I would like to think that they didn’t know, but certainly they could have. They were there,” Mr. Trump said of the Russians in remarks that were viewed as amounting to an explosive suggestion.
Even as they have intensified their criticism of Russia for backing Assad, other senior Trump administration officials, including Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, and Mr. Tillerson have been careful to say there is no evidence proving that Moscow had foreknowledge the Assad regime planned to launch a sarin gas assault.
The newly hardened view of Moscow comes as the president has tried to shake suspicions about the motives behind his campaign calls for warmer relations. As the FBI and multiple congressional committees investigate possible collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump’s campaign, the president and his aides can now point to his hard-line stance on Assad as evidence he’s willing to stand up to Mr. Putin.
More than 80 people were killed in what the U.S. has described as a nerve gas attack that Assad’s forces undoubtedly carried out. Russia says rebels were responsible for whatever chemical agent was used, which the Trump administration calls a disinformation campaign.