Alwaght- US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives on a two-day visit in Moscow on Tuesday but his request to meet Russia's president Vladimir Putin has been rejected.
A Putin spokesman said Monday that they have not announced "any such meetings and right now there is no meeting with Tillerson in the president's diary," Reuters reports. John Kerry, Tillerson's predecessor, often met with Putin and the snub of Tillerson is believed to be the result of Russian anger over the US strike on a Syrian airbase last week.
“We have not announced any such meetings and right now there is no meeting with Tillerson in the president’s diary,” Peskov told reporters on a conference call. He did not say why Putin was not planning to receive Tillerson.
John Kerry, Tillerson’s predecessor, often met Putin as well as the Russian foreign minister when he visited Moscow, and Putin granted several audiences to the Texan when he ran oil major Exxon Mobil before taking his current job.
Putin even personally awarded Tillerson a top Russian state award — the Order of Friendship — in 2013, and it was widely expected that the former oilman would meet Putin on what is his first trip to Russia as secretary of state.
The visit was initially destined to become one of the first steps towards plucking the Russian-US relations out of the deep crisis left over by the Barack Obama Administration. However the US missile strike on a Syrian Air Force base at Shayrat near Homs, supposedly in response to a chemical attack by Syrian government forces in Idlib governorate, results in the first sharp aggravation of tensions between Moscow and the new team in Washington, DC.
Moscow described the missile strike unambiguously as an act of aggression against a sovereign nation in violation of international law norms. "The American side has thus shown full reluctance to cooperate in any way on Syria or to take account of the interests or concerns of other parties to the Syrian peace settlement process," the Russian President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
