Rex Tillerson met with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin today, for the first time since the Exxon former executive became U.S. Secretary of State, and amid deepening tensions between the two superpowers over the crises in Syria, Ukraine and the Korean peninsula. At a joint news conference in Moscow a few hours ago, Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Putin's right-hand man, offered two totally different assessments of whether the Syrian government used chemical weapons to attack its own people and agreed on only one thing: The American-Russian relations are at an “all-time low.”
As Carol Morello and David Filipov report from Moscow for the Washington Post, "the rift between the United States and Russia was laid bare Wednesday when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson held his first direct talks with Russia’s president". And as expected, Washington’s demand that Moscow abandon its traditional Middle East ally was not taken seriously by the Kremlin, forcing Tillerson to admit that “there is a low level of trust between the two countries,” and Lavrov to add that “the world’s two primary nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship.” Yet, despite acknowledging the mess, Wednesday’s meeting brought no indication that their relationship would improve any time soon.
Now, Tillerson has been a very keen negotiator for Exxon in the past, but today, as the foreign news correspondents reported to Reuters, "there were many times, when it must not have been easy to be secretary of state". And as a matter of fact, Tillerson had already spent three hours talking with Lavrov and two with Putin before sitting three feet away from the Russian Foreign Minister only to hear him say that "Moscow has a long list of grievances with the United States, some dating back many years, during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations". To begin with the grievances, Lavrov recalled the U.S. attempts to oust dictators in Sudan and Libya and NATO’s military incursion in Kosovo in 1999. He mocked the non-existent weapons of mass destruction that led to the invasion of Iraq. Later on, a Russian reporter reminded everybody that White House spokesman Sean Spicer had to apologize for his inept and inaccurate comparison of Assad and Hitler, while The Donald himself seemed "to deliver the coup de grâce" to his Secretary of State, admitting that the United States is “not getting along with Russia at all” and that their relations are at an “all-time low.”
The only positive thing that came out of that conference room was that Putin offered to conditionally restore a hotline aimed at avoiding accidents in the air over Syria, renewing an effort that had been suspended after the U.S. missile strikes on April 4; but the deal would apply only if the United States and its allies targeted terrorists — not Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
As a result Tillerson's attempts ended in failure, while the Russians used his visit "as a chance to reassert Moscow’s firm stance on Syria: that it will not abide by any effort to remove Assad from power."
As Reuters and the Washington Post indicate: "Everything Putin did, appeared aimed at minimizing the effect of Tillerson’s visit. He and his officials dismissed U.S. evidence that Assad had carried out the attack, and then Putin added a bombshell prediction of his own: Unnamed forces were going to carry out more chemical weapons attacks and blame it on Assad." Yet, although Lavrov called the evidence cited by Tillerson “hypothetical” and demanded that the United Nations investigate, soon afterward, Russia vetoed -for the 8th consecutive time- a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an investigation.
Finally, talking about things they broadly agreed on — Tillerson and Lavrov said that the Korean Peninsula should be denuclearized, that Syria should be “unified and stable” after the Islamic State is defeated, and that there should be more communication between U.S. and Russian diplomats and militaries. Tillerson said both nations would set up a “working group” to seek ways to ease tensions. But he didn't say when...
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