Awkward: Bolton and Patrushev Refuse to Sign Joint Statement in Geneva.

There is still a certain degree of awkwardness when it comes to Russo-American relations being as frosty as they are. A certain crowd in the US is trying to uphold the notion of the Trump administration being on the Kremlin payroll - but the actions up until now have shown that they would be rather horrible employees if that were the case. On a significant number of fronts - Russia and the United States remain natural geopolitical adversaries, and while there are steps taken to diffuse the tensions like during today's meeting in Geneva - it all comes down to the awkward, yet furiously divided domestic political situation in the United States where the dominating theme, however implausible or plausible it may be, is the continuous talk of election interference. Today's first bilateral discussions since the Helsinki Summit were poised to push progress in a number of different areas ranging from cybercrime, to Ukraine and Syria. Even though a fruitful discussion took place - they still could not sign off on a joint statement simply because of the aforementioned ''elephant in the room''. The US National Security Advisor, John Bolton, brought the issue up several times during the meeting itself and wanted to include a phrase in the joint statement with Russia admitting that they interfered in the US elections. The Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Nikolai Patrushev, agreed to put the phrase in even though the Russian position on the subject has been one of rebuttal - but only if they added a phrase where the Americans take into account their own interference in internal matters. After which, both sides failed to come to an agreement and here we are -- in 2018 with the elephant in the room very much alive putting an awkward strain on Russo-American relations. Disregarding the joint statement failure; as a whole both sides underlined that they achieved significant progress.

Drago Victorien - Unpaid Liar / Media Swindler

https://twitter.com/DragoVictorien
https://www.minds.com/DennisVictorien
https://medium.com/@dragovictorien