Russian expert doubts new USA sanctions against Russia after Putin-Obama talks

Now imagine those frenemies are Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, and that the party they’re both crashing is a session of the United Nations General Assembly. “In accordance with this logic”, he told the world leaders gathered in New York, “we should support tyrants like Bashar al-Assad who drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent civilians because the alternative is surely worse”.

“That offers us an opportunity to have a serious conversation with them”, Obama added. The ongoing violence on the Temple Mount was referenced by Jordan’s King Abdullah II while Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff led-off the speeches with criticism of Israeli building in post-1967 areas.

US officials said the situation in Ukraine consumed about half of Obama’s meeting with Putin.

President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, right, arrive for a United Nations Peacekeeping Summit, Monday, September 28, 2015, at United Nations headquarters. Then, in recounting a conversation he had with Vladimir Putin prior to the recent Russian military buildup in Syria, he spoke of the Russian president’s expressed desire to get involved in that country in order to mount a “more effective” campaign against the Islamic State (IS). Here’s a look at world leaders who have flip-flopped on their approach to the brutal civil war.

Putin, without naming the United States, accused Washington of trying to enforce its will on others and mulling a possible reform of the U.N., which he suggested stands in the way of the perceived USA domination. But he gave no indication that once Islamic State was defeated Russian Federation would use its influence to hasten Assad’s exit.

USA officials said the crisis in Syria, as well as the continued conflict in Ukraine, necessitated an in-person meeting with Putin.

US officials said the leaders agreed to explore ways to pursue a resolution to a crisis that has left more than 250,000 dead, even as they made clear Obama wasn’t bending on his insistence that Assad not be part of the eventual solution.

Peskov said an information centre was being established in Baghdad to share information between Russian Federation, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

“Russia and other global actors, including those who are more actively engaged in the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis (that is the Federal Republic of Germany and France, the so-called Normandy Quartet, certainly, with close involvement of the United States, and we have intensified our dialogue on this issue), we should all be committed to the full and unconditional implementation of the agreements that were achieved in Minsk”.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Turkey’s policy on Syria has been a failure, but not because Ankara was focused too much on regime change. They’ve raised the prospect that Putin’s increased military footprint in Syria isn’t just to prop up Assad, but perhaps also to curry favor with whoever might replace him.

Peskov said he had no information of any Russian air strikes taking place against targets in Syria.

“One terrorist fighting the other will not legitimize it”, he said.

Putin’s speech to the UN was preceded by the airing of an interview to CBS’ Charlie Rose broadcast Sunday evening in the United States, although it was recorded last week outside Moscow.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is making foreign policy a centerpiece of his run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, warned that Putin was making a case that American leadership had failed in the Middle East and Obama was to blame. After the talks, Putin said the discussion was frank and showed that the two sides can work together on common problems. Putin may even see an advantage to deliberately prolonging that war if the exodus of refugees continues to create divisions among the European Union countries that weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance.