RIA Novosti: Obama Calls For ‘Pause’ in US-Russia Ties
WASHINGTON, August 9 (RIA Novosti) – President Barack Obama on Friday called for “a pause” in US relations with Russia, even as both countries stressed that cooperation is crucial to their mutual interests and to the world despite sharp differences on a broad range of issues.
“It is probably appropriate for us to take a pause, reassess where it is that Russia is going, what our core interests are, and calibrate the relationship so that we’re doing things that are good for the United States and, hopefully, good for Russia as well,” Obama told a White House news conference Friday.
The comments came two days after the White House announced it had canceled Obama’s planned summit next month with Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing lack of prospects for progress in the bilateral agenda as well as Moscow’s harboring of accused US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.
But they also coincided with talks in Washington between top US and Russian officials that both sides took pains to describe as constructive while largely downplaying discord over issues such as missile defense, the ongoing civil war in Syria and Russia’s decision to grant temporary asylum to Snowden, who is wanted by the United States to face espionage charges at home.
In his most expansive public discussion of frayed US-Russian relations since his reelection last November, Obama told Friday’s news conference that Putin’s return to the Kremlin last year has coincided with “more rhetoric on the Russian side that was anti-American, that played into some of the old stereotypes about the Cold War contest between the United States and Russia.”
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http://en.rian.ru/world/20130810/182682782/Obama-Calls-For-Pause-in-US-Russia-Ties.html
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