What is most striking to Strategic Demands three days after the Putin-Trump meeting is how little is being reported on *substance* of the talks and/or agreements.
Of the few news/commentary/analysis articles that attempt to look at substance, among thousands published, the reported story is contradictory — secret deals, nuclear deals, what deals?
On what we consider the the ‘issue of issues’, nuclear weapons, there could be a deal on negotiating New START extension, INF resolution of issues, and a new go at ABM, plus addressing weapons in space.
This morning President Putin is quoted speaking to diplomats in Moscow, his first comments on the results of the Helsinki meeting.
CBS, the Associated Press, and ABC report …
July 19, 2018, 8:24 AM EST
Putin declares summit a success, warns Trump’s opponents
MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin called his first summit with President Donald Trump a success – but warned Thursday that Trump’s opponents in the U.S. are hampering any progress on what they discussed, such as limiting their nuclear arsenals or ending the Syrian war.
July 19, 9:36 AM EST
Putin: ‘Certain forces’ in the US want to ‘disavow the results’ of summit with Trump
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday praised his summit with President Donald Trump this week as having been a success but then warned that “certain forces in the U.S. now want to prevent what was achieved there.”
“On the whole the meeting was successful,” Putin said in a televised speech to an audience of Russian ambassadors in Moscow, adding that “positive agreements” had resulted from the Monday meeting in Helsinki, Finland.
“It would be naive to think the problems would be solved in a few hours. But no one expected that,” Putin said.
The meeting, he noted, had allowed the United States and Russia to start down the “path of positive change” and away from a confrontation he said was in some ways “worse than the Cold War.”
No secret deals reached between Putin, Trump: Russian envoy
Business Standard / IANS / Moscow
July 18, 2018 19:15 IST
The Presidents of Russia and the US did not arrive at any secret agreements during their summit in Finland, the Russian Ambassador to the US said on Wednesday.
Anatoly Antonov’s statement came amid a backlash against comments made by US President Donald Trump over Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, an
accusation that US intelligence agencies have confirmed but Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied on multiple occasions.
Trump had refused to denounce his Russian counterpart for interfering in the US presidential campaign and instead contradicted American intelligence agencies.
Talking about the Trump-Putin summit, Antonov said: “There are no secret agreements reached at the meetings held in Helsinki, as far as I know.”
As Russians describe ‘verbal agreements’ at summit, U.S. officials scramble for clarity
Via Washington Post / July 18 at 8:15 PM
Two days after President Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian officials offered a string of assertions about what the two leaders had achieved.
“Important verbal agreements” were reached at the Helsinki meeting, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, told reporters in Moscow Wednesday, including preservation of the New Start and INF agreements, major bilateral arms control treaties whose futures have been in question. Antonov also said that Putin had made “specific and interesting proposals to Washington” on how the two countries could cooperate on Syria.
But officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military, scrambling since Monday to determine what Trump may have agreed to on national security issues in Helsinki, had little to no information Wednesday…
At the Pentagon, as press officers remained unable to answer media questions about how the summit might impact the military…
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did not attend Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting with Trump and has not appeared in public this week or commented on the summit.
Trump continued to praise his private meeting with Putin and an expanded lunch with aides as a “tremendous success” and tweeted a promise of “big results,” but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the administration was “assessing . . . three takeaways,” which she characterized as “modest.” They were the establishment of separate working groups of business leaders and foreign policy experts, and follow-up meetings between the national security council staffs of both countries.
Antonov said it was “very bitter” to hear the intense criticism in the United States of the Helsinki meeting. He cited Trump’s reference to investigations of Russian election interference as a “witch hunt,” and said Russia was “a hostage to the domestic political battle” in the United States.
“When I return from Moscow, I will have the very clear-cut and lucid determination to go knock on every door at the State Department and the National Security Council to understand what we can do together in order to realize the agreements, the ideas, that the two presidents supported,” Antonov said.
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