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So Much for a Thaw: May Gives Putin a Frosty Handshake at G20 Summit Putin Makes a Splash at the G20 Summit
(about 4 hours later)
LONDON — The gesture was meant to signal a thaw in Britain-Russia relations. MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin, already a well established geopolitical star, had a splashy day on the global stage at the Group of 20 summit meeting on Friday, even by his own standards.
But the handshake that Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain offered President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the Group of 20 summit on Friday in Osaka, Japan, was ice-cold, and came with a frosty stare. First, Mr. Putin stirred things up in Europe by proclaiming, in an interview with the Financial Times, that the world’s liberal political order had “outlived its purpose.”
Relations between the two countries have frayed over Britain’s accusation that Russia was behind the poisoning last year of Sergei V. Skripal, a retired Russian double agent, and of his daughter in Salisbury, England. Yet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting in Japan this week, both leaders announced their intention to meet and move toward making amends. Within hours, he listened cheerily through an apparent joke by President Trump about rubbing out journalists in Russia.
“I think Russia and U.K. are both interested in fully restoring our relations, at least I hope a few preliminary steps will be made,” Mr. Putin told the Financial Times on Friday. Later, a video of Mr. Putin shaking hands with an extraordinarily glum-looking Theresa May, the British prime minister, touched off another media storm.
In Osaka, however, Mrs. May again took Mr. Putin to task about the poisoning in Salisbury. She told the Russian leader that relations between the two countries would not normalize “until Russia stops the irresponsible and destabilizing activity that threatens the U.K. and its allies — including hostile interventions in other countries, disinformation and cyberattacks,” according to a statement from the prime minister’s office. And over the course of the summit, a gathering of officials from the world’s wealthiest economies, he conducted a dozen or so meetings and found time to broker a deal with China claiming to cut out the use of dollars in bilateral trade, a longtime goal for Russia.
Mrs. May called the use of a deadly nerve agent on the streets of Salisbury a “truly despicable act,” and repeated Britain’s assertion that the country has irrefutable evidence that Russia was behind the attack. In the interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Putin said that the “liberal idea,” by which he meant the postwar dominance of democracy, human rights, multiculturalism and tolerance, had become “obsolete.”
In the Financial Times interview, Mr. Putin sought to play down the Skripal poisoning. “Listen, all this fuss about spies and counterspies, it is not worth serious interstate relations,” he said. “Liberals cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript.
“This spy story, as we say, it is not worth five kopecks. Or even five pounds, for that matter,” he added, saying that the two countries’ overall relationship, which affects millions of people, was far more important. Mr. Putin said that Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader, had erred in allowing a million refugees, mostly Syrians, to settle in her country, and that Mr. Trump was correct in trying to halt immigrants and drugs from Mexico.
Mr. Putin also made clear that he had would not tolerate spies who betrayed their country. “Treason is the gravest crime possible, and traitors must be punished,” he said. “I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it — but traitors must be punished.” “This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done,” Mr. Putin said. “The migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.”
But “every crime must have its punishment,” he told the newspaper. “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
In the interview, Mr. Putin also criticized what he cast as excessive tolerance for people of diverse sexual orientation and identity. “We have no problem with L.G.B.T. persons,” he said. “But some things appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles.”
Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, responded on Twitter. saying: “I strongly disagree with President Putin that liberalism is obsolete. What I find really obsolete are authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs.”
Mr. Putin, a 66-year-old former K.G.B. agent who has been Russia’s de facto ruler for nearly 20 years, has long shown an understanding of the power of a provocative phrase, and at times flashed a sense of humor as black as coal.
He rose to power in Russia after promising to “whack in the outhouse” his terrorist enemies in Chechnya, a turn of phrase that proved wildly popular in Russia.
Mr. Putin, who from time to time underscores in his speech that he is not a prudish man, once joked that communist labor had the same flaw as group sex, as it’s impossible to tell who is working and who is slacking off.
Faced with criticism over human rights abuses in the war in Chechnya early in his tenure, he once threatened at a news conference to castrate a reporter who asked a question about land mine victims.
In opening remarks before a bilateral meeting at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Mr. Trump, speaking with Mr. Putin in a spirit of bonhomie, had commented about reporters, “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”
Mr. Putin responded that “it’s the same” in Russia.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the untimely deaths of 58 journalists in Russia in the post-Soviet period, many of them by murder or unexplained accidents.
In a conference call with Russian-based reporters Friday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, clarified that Mr. Putin was not criticizing the liberal political order per se but what he saw as efforts by Western leaders to impose it to the exclusion of other political systems.
“Vladimir Putin, in my understanding, remains very close to the ideas of liberalism,” Mr. Peskov said.
“At the same time, if authoritarianism exists somewhere, this is a question of the people of these countries,” Mr. Peskov said. “We should not judge them and change the regime and government in these countries.”