Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is in Moscow for meetings with Russian officials at a time when U.S. rhetoric toward Russia has intensified in the wake of a deadly chemical weapons attack in Syria.
The U.S. launched 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria’s Shayrat Air Base last week in response to the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons against its own civilians.
Tillerson called Russia “complicit or simply incompetent" for its failure to live up to its commitment to remove chemical weapons from Syria. On ABC’s “This Week,” he also accused Russia of meddling in European elections using similar methods it employed in the United States during the 2016 Presidential campaign and said this “undermines any hope of improving relations.”
Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has tried to shift the blame for the chemical weapons attack from the regime, saying Syrian jets had struck a rebel munitions depot. The White House on Tuesday said U.S. intelligence and open source material show the narrative the Kremlin is pushing is false. Officials also said evidence shows the Syrian regime used sarin gas in the attack.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the United Nations needs to investigate the alleged chemical weapons attack by Assad’s regime. He told reporters Tuesday, “It reminds me of the events in 2003 when U.S. envoys to the Security Council were demonstrating what they said were chemical weapons found in Iraq. We have seen it all already.”
Despite the tough rhetoric, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said he is confident U.S.-Russia relations will not “spiral out of control” over Syria. At a news conference on Tuesday, Mattis noted that “we maintain communications with the Russian military and with the diplomatic channels,” and pointed to Tillerson’s visit in Moscow.
“I'm confident the Russians will act in their own best interest, and there's nothing in their best interest to say they want this situation to go out of control,” he said.
Putin has left open the question of whether he will meet with Tillerson, who is the first Trump cabinet official to visit Russia. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday “right now there is no meeting with Tillerson in the president’s diary.”
But Steven Hall, a former senior CIA officer who retired in 2015 and spent much of his career overseeing intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact, told The Cipher Brief, “On one level, it’s a matter of the Russians being prickly and trying to mess with us and sending signals. They hope that they’ll get a rise out of us.”
Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement it hopes for “productive talks,” and the outcome of Tillerson’s meetings in Moscow is important “for the overall atmosphere on the world stage.”
Still, Hall said the most likely outcome is the least productive one: a meeting where “they sort of feel each other out, they talk about things, and they sort of agree to disagree.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, certainly isn’t expecting any headlines from the meetings. At a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington on Monday, he said, “I have very low expectations for this meeting – in part because the Russians are going to try to make it unsuccessful in order to provide a repercussion for this dramatic turn in rhetoric [from Washington toward Moscow, since the Syria missile strike].”
“Success to me is Tillerson coming out of it talking the same way that he did going in, and then coming to work with us in Congress on a set of sanctions that start to continue to tighten the noose on Russia so that eventually we have the leverage necessary to get a better deal,” Murphy noted.
Hall wants to see Tillerson take a stronger stance, where “Tillerson basically goes in and says … you guys again misbehaved in Crimea, you’re paying a price for that. You’re going to be paying a price soon for what’s going on in Syria, unless you guys can work that out.”
The problem, though, is that Trump would have to authorize Tillerson to make those demands, while the U.S. administration’s policy toward Russia remains unclear.
“Russia knows exactly what it wants in Europe and the Middle East, and from us. We, on the other hand, have no clear policy and haven't articulated any goals,” John Sipher, a Cipher Brief Expert and former member of the CIA’s senior intelligence service, said. “Different administration officials have said radically different things about our relationship with Russia.”
Trump has advocated for better relations with Russia, saying it would be “nice” or “great” if the U.S. “actually got along with Russia.” During the campaign, he also repeatedly praised Putin and made several statements supporting Kremlin policy, saying he would “be looking at” recognizing Crimea as a part of Russia and lifting sanctions imposed after the 2014 annexation.
Since coming into office, several top Trump administration officials, including Tillerson, however, have suggested a seemingly harder line will be taken with Russia. Trump’s decision last week to launch the missile strike against Russia’s ally in Syria, the Assad regime, and his notification to the Senate of his support for adding Montenegro to NATO – an expansion of the alliance that Russia strongly opposes – do represent a change in tone by the President.
“This is a very different administration [that we’ve seen develop over the past few days] when it comes to the way that they talk about Russia,” Murphy said. “I think it’s good that we’ve changed, but I’m not excited for an administration that seems to have this kind of sort of rapid transformation in their policy and rhetoric.”
Hall said the Syria strike and subsequent comments from administration officials, like Tillerson, do not necessarily signal a shift in Trump’s thinking and U.S. policy toward Russia.
“The administration finds itself in this difficult position of having to be much more careful and having much less flexibility vis-à-vis Russia than they probably would have because of the ongoing counterintelligence investigation that the Trump Administration is undergoing with regard to whether there was collusion with them prior to the elections,” notes Hall.
The FBI is currently conducting an investigation into whether there was any coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. The U.S. Intelligence Community has assessed that Putin ordered a cyber and influence campaign aimed at interfering in the election to boost Trump’s chances. Inquiries into what happened during the presidential campaign are also ongoing in Congress.
The Cipher Brief’s Walter Pincus wrote on Tuesday that the military strike lets Trump “appear decisive and temporarily divert the media and public away from the Russia-influencing-election scandal,” among other things.
Meanwhile, at a meeting on Syria on the sidelines of this week’s G7 summit of foreign ministers in Italy, top diplomats did not agree to heightened sanctions against Syria and Russia proposed by UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. The final communiqué stated, “It is our mutual interest that Russia returns to the rules-based international security order and again becomes a cooperative partner.”
While acknowledging there are areas of mutual interest with Russia, the communiqué noted, “… we also call on Russia to refrain from undermining or interfering in sovereign matters of other countries and consider such actions as highly detrimental to any future cooperation.”
Kaitlin Lavinder (@KaitLavinder) is a reporter at The Cipher Brief, and Mackenzie Weinger (@mweinger) is a national security reporter.
