MOSCOW, October 22 (RIA Novosti) – The presidents of Russia and the United States will probably not meet again in person this year, but they might still talk on the phone, a Russian presidential aide said Tuesday.
“This year, purely chronologically, it won’t particularly work,” Yury Ushakov, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told journalists in comments on a prospective face-to-face talk between Putin and US President Barack Obama.
“Due to internal problems, as far as we know, he [Obama] isn’t going anywhere outside [the US],” he elaborated, possibly in reference to America’s recent 16-day government shutdown that nearly resulted in the first-ever US debt default.
Ushakov said he had spoken with US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, who is currently visiting Moscow, about possible contacts between the presidential leaders, but nothing specific was decided.
Putin and Obama last met at the 2013 G20 summit in St. Petersburg in early September, where they clashed over how the international community should react to reports of a recent chemical weapons attack during Syria’s ongoing civil war.
