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Putin hopeful about phone call with Trump, says U.S. has role in Syrian peace deal

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as he speaks to the media after his talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Putin’s residence in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, Tuesday, May 2, 2017. (Alexander Zemlianichenko / Associated Press)
By David Filipov Washington Post

MOSCOW – Saying that lasting peace in Syria is impossible without the participation of the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed hope Tuesday – ahead of a telephone conversation with President Donald Trump – that Moscow and Washington could agree on how to end the six-year-old civil war.

“I hope that we will achieve understanding on joint measures in this very important and very delicate area of international politics,” Putin said at a nationally broadcast news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met with the Russian leader Tuesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Trump’s phone call with Putin will be their first publicly announced conversation since U.S. missiles hit a Syrian air base last month, a strike that Trump ordered in retaliation for a sarin nerve agent attack allegedly carried out by the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Putin has said the attack, which killed more than 80 people, was a provocation by rebel forces. Trump, who spent his election campaign expressing admiration for Putin, said after the missile strike that relations with Russia “may be at an all-time low.”

The two presidents spoke after Trump’s inauguration in January, and again when Trump offered condolences in the wake of an April 3 bombing in the St. Petersburg subway that has claimed 16 lives.

“Certainly, without involvement of such a country as the U.S., these problems cannot be solved efficiently,” Putin said.

On Monday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed in a phone conversation to meet on the sidelines of an Arctic Council meeting next week in Fairbanks, Alaska, according to State Department and Russian officials.

Putin has orchestrated a peace process in Syria that has brought together competing regional powers Iran and Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is visiting Sochi on Wednesday to discuss Syria with the Russian leader.

Merkel arrived in Russia as German industry stepped up pressure on her to lay the groundwork for improved economic relations with Moscow. Those relations have been dampened by international sanctions tied to the Kremlin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its proxy war on behalf of separatists in eastern Ukraine.

But Merkel and Putin sparred over Ukraine, where a peace process worked out with the German chancellor’s considerable effort, called the Minsk accords, has bogged down, with both sides accusing the other of breaking cease-fire agreements.

“I would like us to make sure that the sanctions are lifted upon the implementation of the Minsk accords,” Merkel said at the news conference.

In Ukraine, few support the stipulation in the Minsk accords that would allow two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine broad autonomy, which Kiev considers a Kremlin ploy to prevent Ukraine from integration with Western European organizations.

The issue is a matter of national pride in Russia, where nightly reports on state-controlled news programs tell of atrocities by Ukrainian “fascists” while denying the involvement in the conflict of Russian armed forces. Tuesday was the third anniversary of an event in which Russia says Ukrainian nationalists in Odessa forced people into a building and burned them alive.

“Those responsible have still not been held accountable and have not been punished,” Putin said. “The international community cannot either forget about that or allow such barbarous crimes to be committed again in the future.”

A Western condition for the lifting of sanctions has been Russia’s return of Crimea to Ukraine, which Moscow has ruled out.

Alexei Pushkov, a senior Russian legislator, tweeted Sunday that neither “sanctions nor resolutions will change the fact of the unification of Russia and Crimea. They can kick themselves, but they can’t have it back.”

Merkel also brought up allegations that authorities in the Russian province of Chechnya arrested 100 gay men, at least three of whom died, according to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said last month that Moscow had received no confirmation that any violations against gays took place.

“I asked the president to use his influence to protect the rights of minorities,” Merkel said.

Putin, in response to a question about the detention of protesters in Russia, said Russian police behave far more “liberally” and with more restraint than European authorities, “who use tear gas and truncheons to break up demonstrations.”

Another cause for tensions between Germany and Russia is the assertion from European political parties that Russia is meddling in their elections with hackers and fake news stories, the same accusations that the U.S. intelligence community directed at Moscow following Trump’s election victory.

Russia backs the candidacy of right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, who will face off against centrist Emmanuel Macron in France’s presidential runoff vote May 7.

The Kremlin has consistently denied involvement in any of the election campaigns.

“We never interfere with the political processes of other countries,” Putin said Tuesday

Despite Putin’s expressed hope for a rapprochement with Trump over Syria, some Russian analysts have ruled out cooperation between Russian and U.S. forces.

The American demand to remove Assad “rules out the possibility of Russian-American cooperation in Syria because we won’t allow the removal of Assad before his term is up,” Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for European and International Studies of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said recently. “Of course, we will not give in to such blackmail.”

Abandoning Assad is also a practical impossibility, since Russia is committed to a peace process, put together by Putin, that brings together Turkey, Iran, Kurdish fighters and Syrian rebel groups. Putin also wants to use Syria as Russia’s permanent military base in the Middle East – a position shored up Thursday by the return of the Russian missile frigate Admiral Grigorich to the Syrian naval base at Tartus.

Konstantin Sivkov, a member of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Science, said that Moscow would likely shore up its antiaircraft defenses in Syria as well.

“An alliance with the United States is impossible,” he said.

At the heart of Russian uncertainty was the “impulsiveness of decision-making” that led Trump to order the April 7 missile strike on a Syrian government air base.

“The lack of consideration of these decisions, and lack of a clear goal and assessment of the consequences, sharply raises the possibility of military conflict,” he said.