Europe

Trump’s first week has brought ‘ceasefire in US confrontation’ with Russia

Trump and Putin formally discuss global priorities during 45-minute phone call

US president Donald Trump on the phone with Russian president Vladimir Putin, with, from left, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the vice president Mike Pence, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, press secretary Sean Spicer and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Isabel Gorst in Moscow
Sun Jan 29 2017 - 18:09

While much of the world has watched the start of Donald Trump's presidency with a sense of impending doom, the Kremlin has looked to the new US leader to end the bitter confrontation of the Obama era and bring Russia in from the cold.

Relations between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump appeared to be off to a positive start on Saturday as the two men outlined a broad global agenda for US-Russian co-operation that could end the deadlock between the world's two biggest nuclear powers. During a 45-minute telephone call, the Russian and US leaders set a priority for their countries to join forces to defeat Islamic State and other similar terrorist groups in Syria, the Kremlin said in a statement.

Mr Putin and Mr Trump also agreed to co-operate on other pressing global matters, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, nuclear security and non-proliferation, the Iranian nuclear programme and the “main aspects of the crisis in Ukraine”.

“The conversation was conducted in a positive and businesslike spirit,” the Kremlin concluded. This would not have been possible in the final weeks of the Obama administration when Mr Putin was barely on speaking terms with the outgoing US president.

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Russian-US relations, strained by disputes over Ukraine, Syria and Nato enlargement, as well as allegations that the Kremlin interfered in the US election to promote Mr Trump's chances in the presidential race, had sunk so low they "could not be worse", Mr Putin said in December.

Mr Trump's first week in the White House has brought a "ceasefire in the US confrontation", said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Centre. However, until the Russian and US leaders meet for the first face-to-face talks, "it will be unclear where we go from here".

Mr Putin called Mr Trump to congratulate him on his inauguration as US president on January 20th, but the phone conversation on Saturday marked the first time the two leaders held formal negotiations.

Russian bloggers have been talking up prospects for the talks in the past week, amid reports that Mr Trump would easing US sanctions that have been stunting Russia’s economic growth. Many older Russians who lived through the cold war see the sanctions as a national humiliation that must be reversed before relations with the US can improve. Although Mr Putin and Mr Trump underlined the importance of restoring Russian-US trading ties on Saturday, the two men did not mention the sanctions.

Mr Trump is under intense pressure both from anti-Russian politicians in the US and from European leaders not to let Mr Putin off the hook in Ukraine by lifting the sanctions. Some Russian political commentators have suggested that the best Mr Putin can hope for in the early stages of the Trump administration is that the US leader will push back demands from members of his own team and the US Congress for yet more penalties against Russia.

The talks on Saturday were overshadowed by a growing furore over Mr Trump's announcement earlier in the day of a ban on migrants from seven mainly Muslim countries, including Russia's ally Iran, from entering the US. Moscow has not yet commented on the ban that could complicate plans to co-operate with the US in Syria, where Russia has teamed up with Iran and Turkey to promote a cease fire and peace talks.

Ordinary Russians have been watching the early days of the Trump presidency closely for signs of an easing in tensions with the US. Mr Trump’s inauguration was the most memorable event of the month, according to just under half of respondents to a survey conducted by the Levada Centre, an independent Moscow-based polling agency, last week.

Public expectations that Mr Trump would deliver a "miracle" were "overblown", Mikhail Rostovsky, a Russian political analyst warned on Saturday. "It's impossible to predict what Trump might do or what the results of his policies will be," Mr Rostovsky wrote in Moskovsky Komsomolsk, a popular Russian daily newspaper, on Saturday. "With all my personal sympathy for Donald Trump . . . I can't call the new president of the US a rational political player."

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