WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will meet this week with Russia’s top diplomat as the two countries try to salvage a relationship that Tillerson says is worse than at any time since the Cold War.
The crisis in Syria is the most urgent topic on the agenda when Tillerson sits down Wednesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Washington. The United States is dubious about a new Russian-led plan for safe zones in Syria, but Moscow’s incontrovertible clout in Syria’s civil war has made it impossible for Washington to ignore.
The talks come as the Trump administration works to open lines of communication with Moscow in hopes that trust can be rebuilt over time.
Tillerson, speaking to US diplomats last week, said the approach was to ‘‘work on some small things’’ with Russia and to test ‘‘can we work one big thing together’’ — namely, Syria.
‘‘If we can find space for something we feel we can begin to rebuild some level of trust, because today there is almost no trust between us,’’ Tillerson said. Last month, he and Lavrov held tense talks in Moscow in which both publicly acknowledged the sour state of relations.
Lavrov, who rarely visits Washington, had been scheduled to meet Tillerson later in the week in Alaska on the sidelines of an Arctic Council summit. Asked whether Lavrov’s visit boded well for improving ties, Tillerson said Monday: ‘‘We shall see.’’
Both diplomats will still travel to Fairbanks for that summit, where Tillerson will also meet individually with other foreign ministers. Arctic countries have expressed concern that the Trump administration’s environmental positions will undermine efforts to address climate change, especially as President Trump considers withdrawing from the global climate pact reached in Paris.
But David Balton, a top US diplomat who works on ocean and environmental issues, said there would be ‘‘no change’’ to US participation in the council’s climate change work.
Though US-Russia relations plunged to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War (at least according to the White House and Kremlin), Tillerson and Lavrov have met twice before since Trump took office: Once in Bonn in February, and once in Moscow in April.
This will be the first time Lavrov has visited Washington since 2013. The last time a Russian president visited Washington was when then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev came to town in June 2010, a reality that underscores how tense relations between the two countries have become.
Hopes that Trump’s election would somehow dramatically strengthen ties were dashed shortly after Trump was inaugurated.
Among other setbacks, Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, was forced to resign for lying to Vice President Michael Pence about whether he discussed lifting sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
Russian politicians and pundits alike decried the move as a Russophobic witch hunt. Tillerson’s visit to Moscow days after Trump launched 59 tomahawk missiles at an air base in Syria did not help matters.
The situation in Ukraine, in the meantime, has made little progress since Tillerson’s April meeting with Lavrov. Fighting between Ukrainians and Russian-backed separatists continues, and Russia still has not implemented the Minsk agreements.
Ukraine was not included in either the White House or Kremlin readout of Trump’s May 2 call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But Tillerson and his counterpart are also set to address Ukraine this week. According to the State Department, the two officials will discuss the need to end the violence in eastern Ukraine and put the Minsk agreements into effect — much the same discussion that the United States and Russia have been having on Ukraine since 2014.