National security advisor John Bolton is in Moscow for the next couple days for meetings with senior government officials.
Here he is all smiles with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in photos posted by the Russian Foreign Ministry Monday:
He scheduled the trip before President Trump said he would remove the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), but that topic now is on the agenda.
CBS:
The 1987 pact, which helps protect the security of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Far East, prohibits the United States and Russia from possessing, producing or test-flying a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles.
"Russia has violated the agreement. They have been violating it for many years," Mr. Trump said after a rally in Elko, Nevada. "And we're not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we're not allowed to."
Ambassador Richard Burt, one of the chief negotiators in arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union, told reporters on a call organized by the Atlantic Council Monday that Trump’s handling of the nuclear problem was “god-awful.” He pointed out that Moscow had long been opposed to the treaty.
“You have to hand it to the Russians for their deft handling of this. The U.S. pulled out of a treaty the Russians never liked,” said Burt.
CBS:
Bolton was also to speak about the treaty with President Vladimir Putin, likely on Tuesday, according to Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said the Russian leader was looking for "clarifications" about U.S. intentions.
(...)
Bolton himself is pressuring President Trump to leave the INF and has blocked talks to extend the New Start treaty on strategic missiles set to expire in 2021, according to Britain's The Guardian newspaper.
President Trump has been moving toward scrapping the three-decade-old treaty, which grew out of President Ronald Reagan’s historic meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. While the treaty was seen as effective for years, Russia has been violating it at least since 2014 in an effort to menace other nations.
But the pact has also constrained the United States from deploying new weapons to respond to China’s efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and to keep American naval forces at bay. Because China was not a signatory to the treaty, it has faced no limits on developing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which can travel thousands of miles.
Today, Bolton also met with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and brought up another important lingering matter – election interference. He said Russia's meddling, if it happened, had no significant impact on the 2016 race.
“Today I told our Russian colleagues that their meddling in our election process had hardly had any real effect,” radio station Ekho Moskvy quoted him as saying on a visit to Moscow.
“But the important thing is the desire for interfering in our affairs itself arouses distrust in Russian people, in Russia. And I think it should not be tolerated, it should not be acceptable,” he said.
From CNN's Kevin Liptak:
U.S. to Tell Russia It Is Leaving Landmark I.N.F. Treaty (NYT)
Trump says U.S. will pull out of intermediate range nuke pact (CBS News)
Putin to seek "clarifications" from John Bolton in Russia as Donald Trump ditches INF nuke treaty (CBS News)
Russian meddling in U.S. elections had negligible effect, Bolton says (Reuters)
TRUMP ADVISER JOHN BOLTON TOLD RUSSIANS THAT THEIR ELECTION MEDDLING 'HARDLY HAD ANY REAL EFFECT' (Newsweek)