Arms control, Iran high on Pompeo's Russia agenda

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will head to Russia for talks with President Vladimir Putin amid heightened US-Russia tensions over the crisis in Venezuela and the Washington's hardline policy on Iran, the State Department said on Friday, The Associated Press reported.

According to Xinhua News Agency, Pompeo's Russia trip is scheduled from May 12 to 14. He will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow on May 13, according to a statement issued by the department.

Pompeo would then travel to Sochi on May 14 to meet with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and President Putin.

Pompeo's meeting with Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi will be the highest-level face-to-face talks between the two sides since the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The State Department said Pompeo and Putin and Lavrov would discuss "the full range of bilateral and multilateral challenges" facing the two countries. A senior department official said in addition to Venezuela and Iran, the talks would include arms control, stalled US nuclear negotiations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as well as Syria issue.

The official, who was not authorized to preview the trip publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Pompeo did not necessarily expect the talks to produce any "overnight" breakthroughs and were instead "an opportunity to take the conversation to a higher level".

After meeting with Lavrov on the sidelines of an Arctic Council foreign ministers meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, on May 6, Pompeo said he believed the conversation had been "good" and had set the stage for potentially positive discussions on the significant differences between Washington and Moscow on many issues.

"We covered a wide range of issues and I think on every one have charted a way that we can begin to have positive conversations forward," he said. "We have interests that are definitely different and there will be places where we run into hard stops pretty quickly, but there is no doubt there was a desire to begin to try and find paths where we can make real progress on places where we have overlapping interests."

On election interference, although Trump has downplayed its significance and rejected allegations that his campaign colluded with Russia to win in 2016, Pompeo said he had told Lavrov in Finland that "it's not appropriate and that we're going to do everything we can to deter it".

The senior official said Pompeo would be interested in hearing Putin's account of his recent meeting with DPRK top leader Kim Jong-un, who visited Vladivostok, Russia, last month amid an impasse in talks with the US and has since directed several ballistic missile tests.

Pompeo will begin his two-day visit in Moscow, where he will meet employees of the US Embassy as well as US business leaders and Russian alumni of State Department-run exchange programs.

(China Daily 05/13/2019 page12)