Moscow
“There is a low level of trust between our countries,” Tillerson said in a news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “The world’s two primary nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship.”
Wednesday’s meeting brought no indication that the relationship would improve any time soon.
After Tillerson spent three hours talking with Lavrov and almost two hours at the Kremlin with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lavrov, sitting three feet from Tillerson, aired a long list of grievances with the United States, some dating back many years.
“Unfortunately, we’ve got some differences with regards to a majority of those issues,” Lavrov lamented.
The only concession that Tillerson appeared to have extracted from the Russians was that Putin offered to restore a hotline aimed at avoiding accidents in the air over Syria. Russia had suspended that effort after U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian air base following an April 4 chemical weapons attack on a village in rebel territory. Even this tiny success was conditional; Russia said it would return to the deal only if the United States would forgo strikes against Assad’s forces.
Hopes may never have been high, especially after Russia sounded a strident note before Tillerson arrived in Moscow. But if this was the chance to find common ground before the Trump administration attempts any new action on Syria, it has ended in failure.
The Russians used Tillerson’s visit as a chance to reassert Russia’s firm stance on Syria: that it will not abide by any effort to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.
Russia effectively hid from public view the hit that the Kremlin took to its standing in the region because of Assad’s attack. Just two weeks ago, Russia was in the driver’s seat in Syria, as the lead military and diplomatic player in a peace process involving Turkey, Iran, the Kurds and rebel groups, all orchestrated by Putin. The most important part of this was that the United States was not getting in the way.
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.