Kerry holds talks with Putin during first visit to Russia in two years
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Version 0 of 1. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, has spent nearly four hours in talks with Vladimir Putin during a visit to the Russian president’s Black Sea residence in Sochi. Related: Putin voices grievances as huge parade marks 70th anniversary of victory Kerry’s plane landed in Sochi on Tuesday morning for the one-day visit, his first to Russia for two years and he was due to leave for Turkey in the evening. He spent several hours in talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, before the pair met Putin. “Had frank discussions with President Putin & FM Lavrov on key issues including #IranTalks, #Syria, #Ukraine,” Kerry wrote on his Twitter feed. At a joint briefing after the talks, Lavrov said: “Of course, one of the main themes was Ukraine. There is a disagreement between Russia and US about what the genesis of the crisis is, but we were united in our desire to solve the crisis in an exclusively peaceful way through the Minsk agreements.” He added that there had also been discussion of Iran, Libya, Syria and other “relevant global issues”. Kerry thanked Putin for his “directness” and his “detailed explanation of Russia’s position” on a number of global issues. He appeared conciliatory on Ukraine, making no mention of Russia’s annexation of Crimea or military intervention in the east. Instead, he said all sides had to work as hard as possible to implement the Minsk ceasefire accord and that he would be calling the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, to push him to abide by the ceasefire. Earlier, after his initial talks with Kerry, Lavrov said they had gone “wonderfully”. “Both delegations are in a good mood and the fact that Kerry has come at all says a lot,” said a correspondent covering the event on Russian state television. The friendly exchanges masked a period that has seen angry rhetoric from both sides. Kerry has not visited Russia since May 2013. Since then, the Maidan revolution ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, leading to the Russian annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine. The US and EU have imposed sanctions on Russia for its actions in Ukraine, which in turn have led to what many analysts have called the most dangerous standoff between Russia and the west since the Cuban missile crisis. In a recent documentary on the annexation of Crimea, Putin suggested Russia had been ready to use nuclear weapons if necessary. There has been little love lost between Washington and Moscow in recent months, with Kerry accusing Russian officials of lying “to my face” about the involvement of Russian troops in east Ukraine. Before the meeting, Russia’s foreign ministry released a sharp statement, saying US-Russian relations were enduring a difficult period “because of the targeted unfriendly actions of Washington”. “Unfairly blaming Russia for the crisis in Ukraine, which was actually in the main provoked by the US itself, Obama’s administration in 2014 went down the road of ruining bilateral links,” said the ministry. Kerry’s visit to Russia shows that for all the tough rhetoric, Washington feels it cannot disengage completely from Russia, particularly given Moscow’s role in other important global issues such as Syria and Iran. “Important to keep lines of communication between the US and Russia open as we address pressing global issues,” Kerry wrote on Twitter. On Russia’s part, Putin’s willingness to meet with a counterpart who is not a head of state shows Russia is also keen to keep a dialogue going. As relations with the west have worsened, Putin has been trying to put together a new alliance of non-western states. A huge military parade was held in Moscow on Saturday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Allied victory in the second world war, which has become Russia’s biggest holiday under Putin. The leaders of China and India were among those who came to Moscow for the parade, which featured 16,000 soldiers and hundreds of armoured vehicles and missile systems rolling across Red Square. Putin said the Russian people would already remember the solidarity of Britain, the US and other allies during the second world war, which in Russia is known as the great patriotic war and does not include the two years from 1939 to 1941 in which the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany. However, he used his speech to berate the US, without naming it, for its attempts to act as a global superpower and create a “unipolar world”. After the parade, Putin held talks with Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and North Korea’s nominal head of state, Kim Yongnam. The Venezeualan president, Nicolás Maduro, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Cuba’s Raúl Castro were in attendance. However, almost no western leaders were present, in protest at Russia’s recent actions in Ukraine. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, visited Moscow the day after the parade to lay a wreath at a war memorial, but she criticised Russia’s “illegal” annexation of Crimea in a joint press conference with Putin. It did not appear that Putin and Merkel made any significant progress on the Ukraine crisis in their talks, with the German leader calling on Russia to use its influence with the separatist forces to stop ceasefire violations and Putin claiming it was the Ukrainians who were violating the truce. It does not seem likely that Kerry and Putin will be able to make a major breakthrough, either. Before the talks on Tuesday, Lavrov and Kerry laid wreaths at a monument to the Soviet dead in the second world war. Over lunch, Lavrov gave Kerry a T-shirt emblazoned with the word Pobeda, or “Victory”. Kerry presented Lavrov with a dossier of quotes from Russian media that “do not help improve Russian-American relations”, according to Russian television. |