Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 19 said some forces in the United States were trying to undermine the success of his first summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, but they had managed to begin to improve the ties anyway.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump sat down for their first summit in Helsinki on July 16, an event that sparked a storm of criticism in the U.S. after the U.S. President refused to blame the Russian leader for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, comments he later appeared to backtrack on.
Mr. Putin, speaking to Russian diplomats from around the world assembled in Moscow, said the summit had been a success overall, but complained about what he described as ”powerful” U.S. efforts to sabotage it.
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“We see that there are forces in the United States that are prepared to casually sacrifice Russian-U.S. relations, to sacrifice them for their ambitions in the course of an internal political battle,” he said. Those forces appeared ready to sacrifice U.S. jobs and hurt the U.S. economy while waging their political battle.
He said it would have been naive to expect that the summit could have resolved problems that had built up over many years in the space of a few hours, but that a start had been made. “... The path to positive changes has all the same begun,” he observed. “It's important that a full-scale meeting has finally taken place allowing us to talk directly.”
Mr. Putin warned, however, of the dangers of Moscow and Washington failing to continue to mend ties, saying the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) would expire in a year-and-a-half unless work on extending it started now.
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