Dark US forces trying to destroy Russian ties, says Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has slammed ‘forces’ in the US he says are willing to sacrifice Russian-US ties.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow yesterday. Picture: AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin has slammed ­“forces” in the US he says are willing to sacrifice Russian-US ties, two days after a summit with his US counterpart Donald Trump.

Commenting on the summit publicly for the first time last night, Mr Putin criticised the ensuing backlash against the US President.

“We see that there are forces in the US that are easily ready to sacrifice Russian-American relations for their own ambitions,” Mr Putin said in a speech to Russian ambassadors gathered in Moscow.

“We see that there are forces in the US that put their narrow party interests higher than national ones.”

Mr Putin added that Russia was “nevertheless open to developing contacts with the US on the basis of equality”.

“We need a new positive agenda, aimed at working together and finding common ground,” he said.

“We talked about this of course while meeting President Trump.”

Mr Trump’s embrace of Mr Putin this week drew derision and outrage across the US political spectrum. On Monday, Mr Trump appeared to accept Mr Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election at their joint press conference in Helsinki, sparking uproar in Washington. He later reversed his position, saying he “misspoke”.

However, Mr Putin said the summit nevertheless was a success, and said his country remained “open” to contacts with the US. He told the Russian diplomats that US-Russian relations were “in some ways worse than during the Cold War”, but that his meeting with Mr Trump allowed them to start on “the path to positive change”.

“It’s naive to think that the problems would be solved in a few hours. But no one expected that,” Mr Putin said.

In a possible dig at Mr Trump’s unpredictable presidency, Mr Putin vaunted Russia’s “consistent, responsible, independent foreign policy”.

He had both criticism and praise for Mr Trump in a broad speech about Russian foreign policy. He praised Mr Trump’s mediation efforts in North Korea, but slammed his decision to pull out of the international accord curbing Iran’s nuclear activities.

He also lashed out at Europe and US-dominated NATO, saying Russia would hit back with an “equivalent response” to NATO bases near Russia’s borders and other “aggressive steps”, without elaborating.

In contrast to the US reaction to Mr Trump, Russian politicians have rallied behind Mr Putin and shrugged off Mr Trump’s wildly contradictory accounts of what was said at the summit. They were angry, however, at proposals by US legislators to question Mr Trump’s translator about what the men discussed privately.

Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said the idea set a dangerous precedent that threatened the “the whole idea of diplomacy”.

Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, said yesterday he hoped “verbal agreements” between Mr Putin and Mr Trump would “be fulfilled”.

AFP, AP