Now, Tabler said, the Russians can point to more USA strikes as the price of further intransigence by Assad.
Though such comments hint at a more activist USA foreign policy focused on preventing humanitarian atrocities, Trump has consistently suggested he prefers the opposite approach.
The group's stance was a rebuff to British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who said Monday the G-7 was considering new sanctions on Russian military figures to press Moscow to end military support for the "toxic" Assad government.
"We must have a dialogue with Russian Federation", he said.
Any hope in Russian Federation that the Trump administration would herald less confrontational relations has been dashed in the past week after the new US leader fired missiles at Syria to punish Moscow's ally for its suspected use of poison gas.
During his first day in Italy, Tillerson plans to meet Monday with foreign ministers from the United Kingdom and France before the G-7 summit formally opens.
"We both have agreed our lines of communication shall always remain open", Tillerson said.
Yet even as the USA seeks to project a sense of urgency about the Syria crisis, Washington has struggled to explain a hazy strategy that has yet to clarify key questions: whether President Bashar Assad must go, how displaced Syrians will be protected and when America might feel compelled to take further action. He said those agreements made Russian Federation the guarantor that Syria was free of chemical weapons.
Tillerson said on Thursday that Russian Federation had "failed in its responsibility" to remove Syria's chemical weapons under a 2013 agreement, which he argued showed Russian Federation was either complicit with the gas attacks or "simply incompetent".
Tillerson said he had not seen hard evidence that Russian Federation knew ahead of time about the chemical weapons attack, which killed at least 70 people, but he planned to urge Moscow to rethink its support for Assad in the April 12 talks.
Trump's Supreme Court Justice sworn
Justice Gorsuch, who once clerked for Justice Kennedy, will be the first member of the court to serve alongside his former boss. On the list is a plea that the court decide whether the Second Amendment grants a right to carry firearms outside the home.
The official said that there might be a three-way meeting later this week in Moscow between officials from Russia, Syria and Iran.
Here's the background to Tillerson's crucial trip to Moscow.
Spicer did not elaborate on what a potential USA response could include, but said additional actions are a possibility.
The top American diplomat plans to use his meetings with foreign ministers from the Group of 7 industrialized economies - normally a venue for wonky economic discussions - to try to persuade leading countries to support the US plan.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says the allegations of Moscow's meddling in the USA presidential election haven't been proven.
USA officials previously have said Russians routinely work with Syrians at the Shayrat air base where the attack is supposed to have originated. "No", Trump said. But, he added, "I see them using gas. we have to do something". Tillerson answered a question about effecting regime change by saying the USA was organizing a coalition to do just that. The next day, Putin said that groundless accusations in the chemical weapons incident in Syria's Idlib were unacceptable before the investigation into the matter had been carried out.
He spoke during a memorial in the Tuscan town of Sant'Anna di Stazzema to mark a Nazi 1944 massacre, ahead of a G7 foreign ministers meeting in nearby Lucca, Italy.
It's as of yet unclear what the president meant by "not going into Syria". Last month, he sent 400 more USA troops into Syria, doubling the US military presence in the country, to prepare for a battle for Islamic State headquarters in Raqqa.
"But the question of how that ends and the transition itself could be very important in our view to the durability, the stability inside of a unified Syria", Tillerson added, per CBS.
Tillerson kept to more calibrated remarks, saying his aim was "to further clarify areas of sharp difference so that we can better understand why these differences exist and what the prospects for narrowing those differences may be". The Trump administration will have to decide whether it is enough to send a military signal to Assad to never again use chemical weapons, or whether it will have to go further to ensure that the regime is stripped of all its chemical weapons capabilities.
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