Russia: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, President Vladimir Putin clash over Syria, U.S. election in meeting.
MOSCOW — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with President Vladimir Putin of Russia for nearly two hours Wednesday, but the two men appeared unable to agree on the facts involving the deadly chemical weapons assault on Syrian civilians or Russian interference in the U.S. election — much less move toward an improvement in basic relations.
“There is a low level of trust between our countries,” Tillerson told reporters at a joint news conference with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, after the first face-to-face meetings between Russian leaders and a top emissary of the Trump administration.
“The world’s two foremost nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship,” Tillerson said.
Both he and Lavrov said that a range of issues were discussed — most notably the crises in Syria, North Korea and Ukraine — and that both sides had agreed to establish a working group to examine, as Lavrov said, “the irritants” in relations between the United States and Russia.
Tillerson reiterated the U.S. view that President Bashar Assad of Syria, Russia’s chief Middle East ally, was responsible for the chemical weapons assault in northern Syria on April 4 that left more than 80 people dead, sickened hundreds and outraged the world.
Lavrov reiterated the Russian view that the facts about the chemical weapons attack had yet to be determined and denounced what he described as the “media hysteria” surrounding the assault.
Tillerson said Russian interference in the presidential election was a settled fact. In response, Lavrov gave what amounted to a long lecture on what he described as an extensive list of U.S. efforts to achieve “regime change” around the world, from Serbia to Iraq to Libya. He described them all as failures — an implicit warning against any efforts to achieve the same end in Syria.
In the 24 hours before Tillerson landed in Moscow, the White House accused Putin’s government of covering up evidence that Assad had been responsible for sarin gas attacks on its own people, launched from a base where Russian troops are operating.
Putin shot back that the charge was fabricated and accused the Trump administration of fabricating the evidence to create a fake confrontation.