WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 30th May, 2019) US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin should meet and see if they can ease the tensions in the bilateral relationship between both countries, Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker said at an event on Wednesday.
"There's a long list of issues with Russia that are not good. As a general proposition, you'd like our leaders to be able to meet and talk and see if we can cool it off a little bit, find something that we can do constructively," Volker said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "We ought to try to be able to manage this major disagreement among two big countries. It's still not clear we are going to be able to do it, but that's where we are."
Volker said that Russian actions indicate that Moscow is not ready to talk. Nevertheless, the special representative said he intends to continue attempts to engage Russia in bringing peace to Ukraine's Donbass region.
Volker said that Trump and Putin could meet at next month's G20 summit in Japan, despite Russia's refusal to release two dozen Ukrainian sailors.
"That's a tough one, but it may be that for the greater good of trying to create some kind of stability in an otherwise very fractured US-Russia relationship you need to have at least some meetings," he said.
On Monday, a Moscow court rejected appeals by eight of the 24 Ukrainian sailors detained in the Kerch Strait against earlier arrest orders and ruled to keep them in custody for another two months.
On November 25, Russian authorities seized three Ukrainian vessels for illegally crossing maritime borders. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the incident was a provocation prepared in advance as a pretext to declare martial law in Ukraine and to boost then-Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko's low approval ratings.
