FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Excerpts from President Putin’s Helsinki Press Conference Statement
July 16, 2018 (EIRNS)—Here are excerpts of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press conference statement:
President Putin: I think we can call it a success and a very fruitful round of negotiations. We carefully analyzed the current status—the present and the future of the Russia/United States’ relationship, key issues of the global agenda. It’s quite clear to everyone that the bilateral relationship are going through a complicated stage and yet those impediments—the current tension, the tense atmosphere—essentially have no solid reason behind it. The Cold War is a thing of past. The era of acute ideological confrontation of the two countries is a thing of remote past, is a vestige of the past....
Today both Russia and the United States face a whole new set of challenges. Those include a dangerous maladjustment of mechanisms for maintaining international security and stability, regional crises, the creeping threats of terrorism and transnational crime, the snowballing problems in the economy, environmental risks and other sets of challenges.
We can only cope with these challenges if we join the ranks and work together, hopefully we will reach this understanding with our American partners....
As major nuclear powers, we bear special responsibility for maintaining international security.... We submitted our American colleagues a note with a number of specific suggestions.
We believe it necessary to work together further on—to interact on the disarmament agenda, military and technical cooperation. This includes the extension of the Strategic Offensive Arms Limitation Treaty. It’s a dangerous situation with the global American anti-missile defense system, it’s the implementation issues with the INF treaty. And, of course, the agenda of non-placement of weapons in space.
We favor the continued cooperation in counter-terrorism and maintaining cyber security.
And I’d like to point out specifically that our special services are cooperating quite successfully together....
I recall I reminded President Trump about this suggestion to re-establish the working group on anti-terrorism.
We also mentioned a plethora of regional crises. It’s not always that our postures dovetail exactly, and yet the overlapping and mutual interests abound. We have to look for points of contact and interact closer in a variety of international fora.
Clearly, we mentioned the regional crisis, for instance Syria. As far as Syria is concerned, the task of establishing peace and reconciliation in this country could be the first showcase example of this successful joint work....
Both Russian and American military acquired useful experience of coordination of their actions, established the operational channels of communication which permit it to avoid dangerous incidents and unintentional collisions in the air and on the ground.
Also crushing terrorists in the southwest of Syria. The south of Syria should be brought to the full compliance with the Treaty of 1974—about the separation of forces, about separation of forces of Israel and Syria. This will bring peace to Golan Heights, and bring a more peaceful relationship between Syria and Israel, and also to provide security of the state of Israel....
We’re glad that the Korean Peninsula issue is starting to resolve. To a great extent it was possible thanks to the personal engagement of President Trump, who opted for dialogue instead of confrontation.
We also mentioned our concern about the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA. Well, the U.S.—our U.S. counterparts are aware of our posture....
While we discussed the internal Ukrainian crisis, we paid special attention to the bona fide implementation of Minsk Agreements by Kiev. At the same time, the United States could be more decisive in nudging the Ukrainian leadership, and encourage it to work actively on this....
American delegation was one of the largest delegations in the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. It featured over 500 representatives from American businesses. We agreed—me and President Trump—we agreed to create the high-level working group that would bring together captains of Russian and American business. After all, entrepreneurs and businessmen know better how to articulate this successful business cooperation. We will let them think and make their proposals and suggestions in this regard.
Once again, President Trump mentioned the issue of the so-called interference of Russia with the American elections, and I had to reiterate things I said several times, including during our personal contacts, that the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including the election process.
Any specific material, if such things arise, we are ready to analyze together. For instance, we can analyze them through the joint working group on cyber-security, the establishment of which we discussed during our previous contacts....
[One] idea is to create an expert council that would include political scientists, prominent diplomats and former military experts in both countries, who would look for points of contact between two countries, that would look for ways of putting the relationship on the trajectory of growth.
In general, we are glad the outcome of our first full-scale meeting because previously we only had a chance to talk briefly on international fora. ... Clearly, there are some challenges left when we were not able to clear all the backlog, but I think that we made the first important step in this direction.
