Kremlin lukewarm toward Trump
U.S. president ‘not our man,’ says Putin spokesperson in Saturday TV interview
MOSCOW— Whatever the expectations for President Donald Trump’s new relationship with Russia, anyone looking for a dramatic shift from the Kremlin is going to have to wait past day one.
While some Russian companies and political activists have taken advantage of “Trumpomania” here, holding inauguration parties and putting the new president’s face on sugar cubes and commemorative coins, the Moscow establishment is repeating a simple mantra designed to limit expectations: “Donald Trump is not our man.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s personal spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, repeated those words during a television interview slated to air Saturday evening. He emphasized that the Kremlin would play a wait-andsee approach with the new president on key issues such as the crisis in Ukraine, war in Syria and bilateral relations.
According to an advance transcript of his remarks, he also trashed a proposal by President Trump in an interview last week with European newspapers to reduce nuclear arms substantially.
“Nuclear disarmament is a conceptual umbrella term, but it is made up of an enormous number of nuances,” Peskov said on the Saturday evening current affairs program on state television. “It can’t be disproportionate. The composition of the nuclear (arsenal) in the United States and in our country are different. And that’s why any symmetric reductions are absolutely unacceptable and inappropriate.”
Trump told the Sunday Times this week that the European Union “has sanctions on Russia — let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia. For one thing, I think nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially, that’s part of it.”
The Kremlin has taken pains in public not to look desperate to have the sanctions repealed. Peskov said Saturday that “tying together the question of sanctions and of nuclear reductions will not likely be possible from the expert point of view. Our president has repeatedly said that the question of sanctions is not part of our agenda. Russia was not the initiator of this question. And it won’t be, in the words of Putin, the initiator of their repeal.”
Putin will call Trump in the next few days to congratulate him on his inauguration, Peskov said. So far, no meeting between the two leaders has been arranged.