White House: Next Week’s Planned Meeting Proves Putin ‘Desperate’

US, Russia Both Insist Talks Were the Other Side's Idea

by Jason Ditz,

During next week’s UN General Assembly, President Obama will be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, because they’re both going to be in the same city going to the same conference and it seems like a meeting like this is basically common sense.

But with US-Russia relations struggling, the fact that the meeting is happening at all is a matter of a lot of dispute, with both sides insisting that the meeting was the idea of the other nation, and that their respective leader could really care less if they met at all.

The White House went so far in their narrative to claim that Putin’s offer of talks wafts of “desperation” and that it took several requests to get Obama to agree, something he only did on the notion that US interests could be “advanced” in some way by the meeting.

The two sides don’t really agree on what they’re going to be talking about, either, with the Russian government suggesting the focus would be on the huge war going on in Syria and the growing amount of territory ISIS controls there, while the White House insists that they just want to talk about Ukraine, even though the war there has been in a ceasefire for over half a year.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/09/24/white-house-next-weeks-planned-meeting-proves-putin-desperate/