THE GIVE and take between Moscow and Washington that accompanies efforts to reinvigorate relations appeared to lean further in Russia’s favour as US secretary of state Hillary Clinton began a three-day visit to Russia.
Last month, US president Barack Obama granted the Kremlin a major concession by scrapping a missile defence shield in eastern Europe, a plan Moscow had seen as a major threat to its security.
Critics attacked Mr Obama for not securing any political favours in return, and analysts have since been watching for a quid pro quo from the Kremlin.
Hopes were high that Mrs Clinton would secure it this week, as Russia finally showed signs of openness last month to the possibility of harsher sanctions against Iran over its controversial nuclear programme.
But Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, instead tempered the September 23rd announcement from Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who said of Iran that “sanctions are seldom productive but are sometimes inevitable”.
“The president did not say sanctions are inevitable,” Mr Lavrov said during a joint press conference with Mrs Clinton.
“He said we are very restrained about sanctions, but there are times when they are inevitable when all other diplomatic measures are depleted. This obviously is not the case with Iran.”
Mrs Clinton did not press him on the issue, choosing instead to highlight shared points of view.
“We believe that Iran is entitled to peaceful nuclear energy but that it is not entitled to nuclear weapons. Russia agrees with us on that,” she said.
“We did not ask for anything today. We reviewed the situation and where it stood, which I think was the appropriate timing for what this process entails,” Mrs Clinton said after the talks.
Mr Lavrov also appeared non-committal on the issue of replacing the missile defence shield – a plan put forward by the Bush administration – with a joint US-Russia missile defence mechanism proposed by Mr Obama’s team.
“The more we know about this idea, the sooner we will understand whether we can work jointly on a project,” Mr Lavrov said.
Kommersant, Russia’s leading daily newspaper, reported that the US would offer Russia another olive branch during Mrs Clinton’s visit by agreeing not to publicly criticise Moscow over lack of democracy or human rights abuses.
This kind of criticism had been a major irritant in US-Russia relations under former US president George W Bush, whose administration regularly criticised the Kremlin over alleged election irregularities, Russia’s perceived belligerence toward its neighbours and the unsolved murders of political opposition figures and journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya.
Citing Michael McFaul, the Obama administration’s main pointman for Russian and Eurasian affairs, Kommersant reported that the US no longer intends to preach to Russia about democratic values or offer criticism of Russian civil society that could irritate the Kremlin.
“We concluded that in this respect we need a reset and a reversal of the previous approach, which had complicated the Russian-American partnership,” the newspaper quoted Mr McFaul as saying after a meeting with Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff and its leading ideologist.
That meeting was to lay out the agenda for Mrs Clinton’s visit.
During her time in Russia, Mrs Clinton is expected to meet Russian human rights groups such as Memorial, which suffered a tragic setback in July when its activist Natalya Estemirova was murdered in the restive North Caucusus region.
Also on the agenda for the visit, which includes a meeting with Mr Medvedev, are the war in Afghanistan, nuclear arms control, joint policy toward North Korea, and the situation in Georgia after its war with Russia last year.