Istanbul: Russian and US diplomats met in Istanbul on Thursday to discuss normalising the operation of their respective embassies after years expelling each others’ diplomats.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the talks followed an understanding reached during President Donald Trump’s call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and contact between senior Russian and U.S. diplomats and other officials in Saudi Arabia.
Speaking during Thursday’s meeting of the Federal Security Service, Putin hailed the Trump administration’s “pragmatism and realistic view” compared with what he described as the “stereotypes and messianic ideological cliches” of its predecessors.
“The first contacts with the new US administration encourage certain hopes,” Putin said. “There is a mutual readiness to work to restore relations and gradually solve a colossal amount of systemic strategic problems in the global architecture.”
Putin said that “part of Western elites are still determined to maintain global instability” and could try to “disrupt or compromise the dialogue that has begun,” adding that Russian diplomats and security agencies should focus their efforts on thwarting such attempts. In Riyadh, Moscow and Washington agreed to start working toward ending the war in Ukraine and improving their diplomatic and economic ties. That includes restoring staffing at embassies, which in recent years were hit hard by mutual expulsions of large numbers of diplomats, closures of offices, and other restrictions.
A US Embassy official in Ankara confirmed that the Istanbul talks focused on the issues affecting the operation of respective diplomatic missions.
Later Thursday, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department said: “The United States raised concerns regarding access to banking and contracted services as well as the need to ensure stable and sustainable staffing levels at the US Embassy in Moscow. Through constructive discussions, both sides identified concrete initial steps to stabilize bilateral mission operations in these areas.”
Moscow had no immediate comments after the negotiations, which Russian news agencies said lasted for over six hours. Valentina Matvienko, speaker of the Russian parliament’s upper house, said during a visit to Turkey on Thursday that U.S.-Russia talks should help restore the “full-fledged work of our diplomatic missions.”