MOSCOW, September 29. /TASS/. Under any circumstances the world’s two largest nuclear powers — the United States and Russia — will go ahead with the dialogue and remain partners, because global issues of war and peace depend on their relations, polled experts told TASS after studying what Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin told the 70th UN General Assembly session and the results of their talks.
The deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of US and Canada Studies, Viktor Kremenyuk, believes that both Obama and Putin looked and sounded "ostensibly uncompromising."
"In reality, the US and Russian presidents are well aware that reluctance to compromise in efforts to settle the politically overripe Syrian crisis is leading to no solution at all. They are aware that operations in Syria need coordination. Otherwise the terrorist Islamic State, seeking to create a Caliphate stretching from Pakistan in the East to Portugal in the West will gain the upper hand," Kremenyuk told TASS.
"With their one-and-a-half-hour-long meeting Obama and Putin demonstrated to the whole world that they find it rather hard to come to terms, but still an agreement is necessary and that the United States and Russia can be partners. It remains to be seen, though, how independent Obama is in his decision-making and if he will manage to persuade the Republicans in Congress cooperation with Russia is a must. In contrast to Obama Putin has the full support in Russia’s parliament, the Federal Assembly," Kremenyuk said.
"Putin’s proactive speech at the UN General Assembly session sent a clear message to the European Union to the effect its indiscriminately pro-American stance is short-sighted and Russia should not be written off, because it remains an influential member of the international community," Kremenyuk believes.
The deputy dean of the world politics and world economics department at the Higher School of Economics, Andrey Suzdaltsev, is certain that "the dialogue between Russia and the United States has always been and will always be."
"The media are exaggerating the unseemly speculations there have been no high-level contacts between Russia and the United States over the past two years. In reality, the two countries’ foreign ministers, Sergey Lavrov and John Kerry, have remained in close contact all the time and Putin and Obama repeatedly talked by telephone. Their meeting at the UN General Assembly session was a clear sign both parties are well informed about each other’s activities in settling the Syrian and Ukrainian crises," Suzdaltsev said.
"The divergence of opinion between the United States and Russia regarding the future of the Bashar Assad government in Syria is tactical. It is important that at the moment the government forces of Syria, Iran and Iraq, with Russia’s military and technical support are conducting an offensive against the positions of Islamic State militants and that the US contribution to the struggle against the IS has been recognized as ineffective," Suzdaltsev said.
He believes that the United States is merely simulating a war with the Islamic State. It merely pretends to be leading a phoney coalition of 62 states, while Russia has been taking concrete steps. "The opening of the coordination centre in Baghdad, open to all countries interested in the struggle against terrorism adds a lot to the role of Russia in the Middle East settlement and forces Washington to turn an attentive ear to Moscow’s arguments," Suzdaltsev believes.
In his opinion, those politicians who had predicted that in New York Putin would be told "to know his place," proved disastrously wrong. "On the contrary, the Obama-Putin talks lasted thirty minutes longer than it had been originally expected, which was a clear sign that the G8 group is still there de facto and that the West takes into account Russia’s opinion in dealing with regional and global crises. Under any circumstances the dialogue between the two nuclear powers will go on, because US-Russian relations are crucial to issues of war and peace on the globe and there will be no getting away from that," he said.
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