Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's visit to Moscow got off to a heated start Wednesday when his Russian counterpart warned the USA shouldn't retaliate against Russia's ally Syria.
Lavrov said that Russian Federation considers, "it crucially important to prevent a repetition of such actions in the future". "The world's two primary nuclear powers can not have this kind of relationship".
"A successful ouster of a dictator is for me very hard to remember", Lavrov said.
Trump ordered a cruise missile strike on Syria's Shayrat air base last week in response to what his administration and US allies say was a poison gas attack by Syria's military in which scores of civilians, including many children, died.
"In general, primitiveness and loutishness are very characteristic of the current rhetoric coming out of Washington", Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russia's state-owned RIA news agency.
But Putin has said there is no evidence that Assad forces carried out the recent nerve gas attack and instead the chemicals belonged to rebels.
But Tillerson said the Ukraine remains the largest obstacle to improving the U.S.
"The level of trust at the working level, especially at the military level, has not become better but most likely has degraded", Putin said in an interview broadcast Wednesday by state television channel Mir. That rebalancing is the opposite of what Trump seemed to favor during the campaign, when he blasted China and wooed Russian President Vladimir Putin at every opportunity.
We were adamant that Assad had to pay for the chemical attack in 2013 and said a military response from the USA was justified. "And so we are mindful of the seriousness of that particular interference in our elections, and I'm sure that Russian Federation is mindful of it as well", Tillerson said.
Tillerson met with Putin and Lavrov on Wednesday. One government official after another has suggested they would like to see Assad gone, but not elaborated on whether it's an immediate US priority. Trump says it's also "very bad for mankind".
Chinese President Xi Jinping told Trump in a telephone call on Wednesday that "any use of chemical weapons is unacceptable" and urged a political solution for Syria, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said of the telephone exchange. "We will continue to work with our worldwide partners to put an end to the use of chemical weapons".
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Of Assad, Trump added: "This is an animal".
"That's a butcher. That's a butcher", Trump said of Assad.
"Russia's initiative in 2013 to dismantle Syria's chemical weapons has been exposed as a shambles".
Russian Federation has slammed Washington's attack on a Syrian airbase and, as Tillerson met Lavrov, Putin admitted that relations have worsened in the three months that Trump has been in office.
Trump, who has faced criticism for lacking a broader strategy to deal with the Syria crisis, insisted he has no plans to "go into" the war-torn country.
U.S. President Donald Trump had previously appeared disinclined to intervene against the Syrian leader and the attack raised expectations that he might now be ready to adopt a tougher-than-expected stance with Russia, Assad's main backer.
The US on Thursday launched 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria to neutralise its chemical weapon arsenal, two days after reports of a chemical weapons attack emerged from the battleground in Syria, which the West said the Syrian government should be to blame. The measure also would have approved an investigation into the chemical weapons attack.
Mr Lavrov called for a United Nations investigation into the attacks in Syria beforehand but no agreement was reached with Washington during the two-hour talks.
Tillerson is the highest-ranking USA official to visit Russian Federation since Trump assumed power.
Separately, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Monday, ahead of a meeting of G7 Foreign Ministers in Italy, that "it's time for Vladimir Putin to face the truth about the tyrant he is propping up". "I think it's very bad for Russian Federation".
The Trump administration's growing willingness to confront Russian Federation directly is serving another objective: defanging the perception of coziness between Trump and Moscow.
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