WASHINGTON — On his first trip to Russia as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson came out of two hours of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 12 saying the United States and Russia needed to take steps to halt the sharp degradation of relations between the world’s foremost nuclear powers.
But while Tillerson said he and his Russian interlocutors were looking to build on areas of common ground, their sharp differences, including over the role of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and his culpability in the April 4 chemical weapons attack in Idlib province, seemed to overwhelm any agreement on a process for advancing a political solution to end the Syrian civil war.
