Trump and Tillerson welcome Russia's top diplomat Politico, May 10, 2017, Michael Crowley
With Washington in an uproar over James Comey's firing amid his Russia probe, the president and his secretary of state are welcoming Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to town.
When Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov arrives in Washington today for talks with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—and an Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump—the moment will hardly be ripe for diplomacy between Russia and the United States.
But Lavrov’s visit to the White House—his first since 2013—is a sign that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who spoke by phone last week, are determined to forge better relations despite strong political headwinds.
“The symbolism does seem significant,” said Samuel Charap, a former State Department official now with the Rand Corporation. Lavrov was not welcome in President Barack Obama’s Washington after Russia’s March 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“At least on a diplomatic level there’s a degree of normalcy that the Obama administration was trying to deny Russia,” Charap added.
Lavrov is stopping in Washington on his way to Alaska, where he and Tillerson will participate in a multinational Arctic Council meeting. Russia’s TASS news service reported that the two men originally planned to meet one-on-one in Fairbanks but added the Washington sit-down at the last minute.
It’s unclear when the meeting with Trump was set, but it is customary for the president to receive a visiting Russian foreign minister. Tillerson met with Putin during his April 12 visit to the Kremlin.
Lavrov’s visit follows last week’s talk between Trump and Putin, during which the two leaders discussed a new Russian plan to de-escalate Syria’s civil war through regional cease-fires. The State Department has said that Tillerson and Lavrov would discuss both Syria and Ukraine.
Sources said they are also likely to discuss the prospects for the first meeting between Trump and Putin, which Russian media has suggested could happen around the July G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany—though the White House has been tight-lipped about the prospect.
In an interview with a Russian television station last week, Lavrov said that because expectations would be high for a Trump-Putin meeting to “deliver specific results… it needs to be prepared thoroughly. We are working on that right now.”
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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/10/trump-tillerson-russia-238191
