Scoring talks, Russia gives win to Putin
Details differ but Trump meeting seen as a reboot of relations
MOSCOW — There was a certain degree of exulting in the Russian capital Saturday in the wake of the first meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, with Putin himself saying that the U.S. president seemed satisfied with his answers on the hacking issue and that the talks set the stage for improved relations.
Asked about the two presidents’ conversation on accusations of Russian hacking during the 2016 U.S. election, Putin said at a news conference in Hamburg, Germany, that Trump paid a lot of attention and asked multiple questions.
“When possible, I answered his questions in detail,” Putin said, noting that he had reviewed previous exchanges that he had had with former President Barack Obama on the topic. “I got the impression that my answers satisfied him.”
A sense of relief
One Russian tabloid called the meeting “historic,” and overall there was a sense of relief that if short on concrete agreements, the talks seemed to halt the downward spiral in relations and lack of contact between the two countries.
This meeting “opened the way to a second, a third, a fourth meeting, where meaningful decisions will be made,” Sergei Markov, a political commentator close to the Kremlin, wrote on Facebook. He hailed the return to “normal contacts,” which he said had been destroyed by O ba ma. O ba ma sought to isolate Russia after it seized Crimea in March 2014.
The main message that emerged after more than two hours of talks on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg on Friday was that deals were possible, analysts said, and the mere fact that the two presidents finally met in person for the first time since Trump was elected mattered more than the lack of a breakthrough.
“It is important that they finally met because if you look at the history of the relations between Washington and Moscow, these relations always depended to a large extent on the personal contact between the two leaders,” said Andrei V. Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, a foreign policy research group. “They defended their trenches, but tried to keep options for future compromises open.”
Gloating in Moscow
The two accounts of the meeting—one from ForeignMinisterS ergeyLavrov and the other by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the only two officials in the room besides the two presidents—differedin some important details.
The Russian president also said he thought that the U.S. position on Syria was becoming more “pragmatic” with the realization that combined efforts might be better.
That sentiment provoked some gloating in Moscow. “It has become clear that Trump recognizes Russia’s serious intentions in Syria and wishes to join the settlement process and to be a party to the resolution of problems in Syria alongside Russia,” Adalbi Shkhagoshev, a member of the foreign affairs committee in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency Tass.