Pompeo to meet Putin as Trump seeks better ties

Bloomberg

US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo leaves for Moscow on Sunday, with President Donald Trump again calling for improved ties now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has
finished his investigation.
Pompeo will meet US diplomats at the American Embassy in Moscow on Monday before continuing to Sochi for talks with President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials. The secretary has 48 hours — the entire length of the trip — to cram in discussions of disputes between the two nations, involving Ukraine, Venezuela and Syria and other issues, along with continued accusations of election interference.
With the Mueller inquiry wrapped up, Trump has returned to signalling his interest in improving US-Russia ties, speaking with Putin for more than an hour and tweeting that there is “tremendous potential for a good/great relationship with Russia.” The two leaders had kept their distance as Mueller’s probe into the 2016 US election and allegations
of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia heated up.
“Clearly since the Mueller report came out, Trump is feeling unconstrained about what he’s wanted all along — a new relationship with Moscow where all the bad issues get swept aside and the two leaders ‘get
down to business,”’ said Andrew Weiss, the former director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council who’s now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“What that means in practice is really fuzzy because the agenda largely consists of issues where the US and Russia are at loggerheads,” Weiss said.
Trump spoke with Putin briefly on the sidelines of a Group of 20 meeting in Argentina in December. That meeting rekindled criticism of their summit last July in Helsinki, where the American president appeared to take Putin’s side over the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies when asked about evidence Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Pompeo could use his trip to start laying the groundwork for a meeting between Trump and Putin on the sidelines of a Group of 20 forum in Japan set for late June. Such an encounter would still be fraught, especially since Trump has appeared reluctant to confront Putin on the meddling accusations, which the Mueller report reaffirmed.
“The Mueller report confirmed accusations of Russian meddling,” said Andrey Kortunov, director general of
the Russian International Affairs Council, a Kremlin-founded think tank. “The report to some extent rehabilitates Trump but doesn’t rehabilitate Moscow at all. For Russia, nothing has really changed.”
A senior State Department official said Pompeo would raise a range of topics, including continuing concerns about Russian election meddling, Moscow’s role in propping up Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and the US desire for more sweeping arms control agreements that include countries like China, not just Russia and US.