WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during next week’s United Nations General Assembly session “despite our profound differences with Moscow,” a senior administration official said Thursday.
The meeting was scheduled at the request of the Russian president, said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss the behind-the-scenes planning.
The planned meeting comes after the U.S. and Russia began holding military-level talks over the ongoing civil war in Syria, part of a bid by Putin to make his country central to international talks on the war and undo Obama’s effort to isolate Russia diplomatically for its support of separatists in Ukraine.
Even though the two leaders disagree on a range of serious issues, the official said Obama believes that it would be irresponsible not to test whether the U.S. can make progress through high-level talks with Russia and put into place the peace plan for Ukraine that was agreed to last year during meetings in Minsk, Belarus, that were mediated by European nations.
“In particular, our European partners have underscored the importance of a unified message about the necessity of fully implementing the Minsk agreements,” the official said. “President Obama will take advantage of this meeting to discuss Ukraine, and he will be focused on ensuring Moscow lives up to the Minsk commitments.”
This will be the “core message” of the bilateral engagement, according to administration officials.
The session could be something short of a full sit-down meeting, the sort of exchange that Obama reserves for world leaders with whom he thinks he can achieve meaningful progress. For Obama, contact at the U.N. with contentious leaders in the past has meant a conversation in the hallway or a pull-aside during a larger meeting. Last year, Obama spoke by phone with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as the U.S. and its allies as well as Tehran tenuously tried to determine whether they could launch full-scale talks to deter Iran’s nuclear program.
A sit-down meeting with Russia would suggest that Obama thinks he might make progress with Putin.
Still, any meeting would represent a step back from Obama’s efforts over the past year to isolate Putin diplomatically because of Russia’s aggressive moves in neighboring Ukraine.
Obama is likely to probe Putin’s motives for Russia’s military buildup in Syria, as well as his intentions in trying to assemble a coalition against the Islamic State terrorist group operating in Syria and Iraq.
U.S. officials are prepared to cooperate with the Russians to some extent on Syria, officials have said, but at the moment they are unsure of Putin’s motives.
In addition, Obama is expected to press Putin to uphold the terms of the Minsk agreements on Ukraine, analysts say, but U.S officials say they are not confident that Putin will do so.
Obama canceled a meeting with Putin in 2013 after Russia took in former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden. The relationship between the leaders turned even colder after Russia moved into neighboring Ukraine last year.
They talked briefly at a D-Day anniversary event in June 2014, and then spoke in Beijing last November. They also talked by phone in July after joining together to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran.
Throughout the chilly period between Obama and Putin, though, Secretary of State John F. Kerry has continued to talk with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
And the Pentagon has watched for the past three weeks as the Russian military has steadily built up its presence at an airfield in Syria’s northwest Latakia province. More than two dozen fighter jets, nine tanks, several surface-to-air missiles and housing for up to 2,000 troops have been spotted at the base. In recent days, the Russians have also flown reconnaissance drones above Syria.
Russia has maintained the equipment is “defensive” in nature. But U.S. officials have not come to a firm conclusion about Russia’s military intentions in Syria. They fear that Moscow will help Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces attack the government’s opponents, some of whom the U.S. backs.
Tensions with Russia in Europe also ratcheted up Wednesday when the Kremlin said it would take countermeasures if the U.S. placed new tactical nuclear weapons at a military base in Germany.
The U.S. military responded that the Pentagon has a longstanding policy to not disclose the location of the tactical bombs, known as B61s. But the Pentagon has publicly stated its intention to embark on a decadeslong effort to upgrade its nuclear arsenal.
There are about 200 B61 nuclear bombs that the U.S. has deployed in five NATO nations stretching from the Netherlands to Turkey. Russia has an estimated at 2,000 tactical weapons.
“Remaining Russian weapons greatly exceed those retained by the U.S.,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said. “We still seek to negotiate an agreement with Russia to address the disparity.”
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