At this point, the bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington are even worse than they used to be during Obama’s administration. This is what President Putin thinks on the matter.
Even though the Russian president thinks so, he hasn’t commented on the details of this degradation in the bilateral relations between the 2 superpowers. He assumes that the level of trust between the United States and the Russian Federation has dropped, especially on the military level.
It should be noted that Vladimir Putin gave his estimation of the bilateral relations shortly before the long-awaited meeting between Sergey Lavrov and Rex Tillerson in Moscow the other day. By the way, this was Tillerson’s first official visit to Russia as the United States Secretary of State.
Given the estimates that Vladimir Putin made regarding America’s foreign policies in general and Donald Trump in particular, it’s easy to figure out that the key and decisive factor that made President Putin change his mind was the USA’s missile assault on a Syrian airbase a couple of weeks ago. The USA claims that Basah Asad used chemical weapons and that was an act of revenge coming from the USA.
Moreover, some experts think that Russia approved Asad’s use of chemical weapons since otherwise Asad wouldn’t have dared do it. This means that Russia’s expectations of better relations with the USA have failed so far. In case you don’t remember, just a couple of months ago, Russia was celebrating Trump’s victory and was hoping that Putin and Trump would make friends. But this hasn’t happened so far and is unlikely to happen in the near future given the recent events.
In late 2016, President-Elect Trump said he could get along with Putin and even promised good relations with Russia. But a couple of months later, his rhetoric changed and we see no reloading the Russia-US relations. Moreover, the recent events show that the relations between the 2 countries have been spoilt and are worse than they used to be during Obama’s administration. Washington is still reluctant to recognize the annexation of the Crimea and doesn’t cancel the anti-Russia sanctions.
