WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will head to Russia this week for talks with President Vladimir Putin amid heightened U.S.-Russia tensions over the crisis in Venezuela and the Trump administration’s hardline policy on Iran, the State Department said Friday.
Pompeo’s meeting with Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi will be the highest-level face-to-face talks between the former Cold War foes since the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Putin and President Donald Trump spoke at length by phone last week and Pompeo saw Lavrov earlier this week in Finland.
The trip will be Pompeo’s first to Russia as secretary of state and as he prepared for his weekend departure, administration critics, including congressional Democrats, noted that a statement highly critical of alleged Russian involvement in an attempted coup in Montenegro had been removed from the State Department’s website.
The statement, which had been released on Thursday, said a Montenegrin court’s conviction in absentia of two Russian intelligence officers for plotting to overthrow the Balkan country’s government and prevent it from joining NATO was “a clear victory for the rule of law, laying bare Russia’s brazen attempt to undermine the sovereignty of an independent European nation.”
After Pompeo’s office objected to the release, the statement was taken down from the website, according to officials, who stressed that it had not been formally recalled and still reflected U.S. government policy. Its removal, first reported by Foreign Policy, however, appeared to amuse Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who tweeted a screenshot of the statement, saying “Good news, @StateDept: we saved a copy.”
The State Department said Pompeo and Putin and Lavrov would discuss “the full range of bilateral and multilateral challenges” facing the two countries. A senior department official said in addition to Venezuela and Iran, the talks would include arms control, stalled U.S. nuclear negotiations with North Korea, Syria, Russia’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine and Washington’s concerns about Russian election interference efforts.
The official, who was not authorized to preview the trip publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Pompeo did not necessarily expect the talks to produce any “overnight” breakthroughs and were instead “an opportunity to take the conversation to a higher level.”
The official said one primary focus of the meeting would be Trump’s desire to modernize and expand existing arms control agreements, particularly ahead of the formal U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty in August after Washington’s repeated complaints that Moscow was violating it. Trump has said he wants new arms control accords that reflect the current post-Cold War situation and bring in other nations, notably China. The official would not be specific about any particular agreement Pompeo would push.
After meeting with Lavrov on the sidelines of an Arctic Council of foreign ministers meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, on Monday, Pompeo said he believed the conversation had been “good” and had set the stage for potentially positive discussions on the significant differences between Washington and Moscow on many issues.
“We have interests that are definitely different and there will be places where we run into hard stops pretty quickly, but there is no doubt there was a desire to begin to try and find paths where we can make real progress on places where we have overlapping interests,” he said.
