The second high-level diplomatic meeting between the United States and Russia has been announced for Thursday, but apparently heading off bitter criticism from Europe that Ukraine wasn’t invited last time, the State Department has said the war won’t be on the agenda.
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed on Wednesday that a fresh round of talks between Washington and Moscow have been planned for Thursday in Istanbul, Turkey. Speaking in Qatar, the Lavrov said the purpose of the talks was a continuation of work on normalising diplomatic relations between the two countries which had been suspended by the Joe Biden Whitehouse after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In particular the purpose of the talks is on the resumption of full operations of embassies in each other’s countries, it was stated. Lavrov said “diplomats” and “high-level experts” would be present.
The Russian diplomat said how well talks progressed on Thursday would give an indication “how quickly and effectively we can move forward”.
Hours later, the U.S. State Department moved to make this point more explicit, telling Reuters that “To be clear, there are no political or security issues on the agenda. Ukraine is not on the agenda”.
The clear message from both parties appears to come in response to a minor diplomatic storm in European capitals when the U.S.-Russia rapprochement talks were first announced as Ukraine nor any other European state was invited to sit at the table. That the purpose of the first meeting was the normalisation of Moscow and Washington lines of communication after several years in abeyance appears to have been lost in the furore, and harsh words were traded.
European states even appeared moved to host their own ’emergency summit’ in Paris.
Speaking Wednesday, Lavrov criticised the previous U.S. administration for having moved to shut down communications between the nations. Somewhat ironically, he phrased this reproval in the terms of international law, the observance of which Moscow is possibly not considered one of the world’s best behaved. He said: “the systemic problems that have accumulated as a result of the unlawful activities of the previous (U.S.) administration to create artificial obstacles for the work of the Russian embassy, to which we, naturally, reciprocated and also created uncomfortable conditions for the work of the American embassy in Moscow.”
The choice of location may be surprising to some extent: Turkey is a NATO member, but of NATO’s major powers it is among the friendliest to Russia and has long been a key bridge between East and West. Turkey is also not the only NATO country open to hosting a Russian delegation, with Slovakia — which has remained out of the Ukraine war — also offering itself as relatively neutral ground.
The previous round of talks, held last week on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia lasted four and a half hours and saw participants from both sides making positive noises after the meeting broke. Russia praised the meeting as “very useful” and both sides said they wanted to move the process forward “in a timely and productive manner”.
One of the great unanswered questions of this is whether, when, and where a leader’s meeting might take place between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. Last week talks member Yury Ushakov said it was not likely Trump and Putin would meet within days, but both wanted to meet sooner or later. He said: “The delegations of the two countries have a lot of work to do. We are ready for this but it is still difficult to speak about the specific date of the meeting between the two leaders… The issue was discussed. We are working out the terms of this meeting”.
Read the full article here