Trump-Putin meeting postponed
WASHINGTON SAYS WILL NEVER RECOGNISE RUSSIA’S 2014 ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA
Washington says US will never recognise Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea |
The Trump administration sought to fend off accusations the president is too soft on Russia, putting off a proposed second summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and declaring the US will never recognise Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
As members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee peppered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with demands for details about last week’s summit in Finland, the White House said on Wednesday that President Donald Trump had opted against trying to arrange another meeting with Putin this fall. Putin already had sent signals that he wasn’t interested in coming to Washington.
National Security Adviser John Bolton cited special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as the reason for the delay, although many members of Congress had objected to the meeting and said Putin would not be welcome on Capitol Hill.
“The President believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year,” Bolton said in a statement, using Trump’s favoured but highly controversial term for the Mueller probe.
While the statement signalled optimism that the Mueller probe would be completed by the end of this year, no timetable has been given for when it will be wrapped up and it could very well stretch into 2019.
The White House said last week that Trump had directed Bolton to invite Putin to visit Washington in the fall, moving quickly for a follow-up meeting amid the backlash over Trump’s performance at a news conference with Putin following their Helsinki summit.
In his testimony, Pompeo faced often-contentious questioning from senators demanding information about what Trump discussed with Putin while they were alone for nearly two hours with only translators present.
Pompeo struggled to answer, insisting the president is entitled to have private meetings but stressing that he had a full understanding of the discussion. Heated questions were also posed about North Korea, Nato and Iran.
The committee chairman, Senator Bob Corker, who set a contentious tone for the hearing by telling Pompeo that senators “are filled with serious doubts about this White House and its conduct of American foreign policy,” later said those doubts are due to Trump’s frequent contradictory statements on the Russia probe and assaults on allies.
“It’s the president that causes people to have concerns,” Corker said. Pompeo replied by saying that some of Trump’s comments “actually achieve important policy outcomes,” but the administration should be judged by its actions rather than the president’s words.
Russia scoffed at a US declaration saying that Washington would not accept Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, suggesting Washington’s Ukraine policy could change in the future.
“We know the worth of these ‘fateful declarations’,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakarova said in a sarcastic comment on Facebook.
She suggested that Washington’s Crimea policy could still change — perhaps even under a new leader in the future.
She said that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran and the Paris agreement for slowing climate change “were also official US policy not long ago” because Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama “personally decided so.”
The US government said Wednesday it would not accept Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, as Trump stepped up his damage control operation after a hugely controversial summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
Trump on Wednesday also delayed a new summit with Putin to next year, just a day after the Kremlin said Putin and Trump agreed in Helsinki to continue their “useful contacts.”
The US declaration slamming Russia’s annexation of Crimea came after the Russian ambassador to Washington said Putin had made a concrete offer on Ukraine to Trump.
The ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, spoke after a report said that at the Helsinki summit, Putin called for a referendum to be held with the help of the international community in Ukraine’s breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which Russia-backed separatists control.
In the declaration, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Russia to “end its occupation of Crimea,” and said Moscow had sought to “undermine a bedrock international principle” shared by democratic states, that no country can change the borders of another by force.