Kremlin, before meeting with Trump adviser, asks if U.S. wants better ties

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Wednesday it needed to understand if there was political will in Washington to cooperate with Russia as it prepared for a meeting between U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton and his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev.

The two men are due to meet in Geneva for talks on Thursday in the first high-level meeting since the Russian and U.S. presidents held talks in Helsinki in July.

U.S. President Donald Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin last month, an event Moscow quickly chalked up as a triumph. However, a new salvo of U.S. sanctions was announced in the wake of the meeting after Trump came under fire at home for his handling of the summit.

“The worsening of bilateral relations is continuing, we need to identify some kind of areas for cooperation and also to understand if there are any such areas and whether our counterpart (the United States) has a desire for this,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.

Peskov said Putin had met his Security Council on Wednesday to discuss problems in U.S.-Russia relations ahead of the meeting between Bolton and Patrushev.

During a trip to Israel on Wednesday, Bolton told Reuters that Russian forces were “stuck” in Syria and that Moscow was looking for other countries to fund post-war reconstruction there.

Russia launched an intervention in Syria in 2015, turning the tide of the war in favor of its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Peskov said Moscow disagreed with Bolton’s statement, saying Moscow was helping to facilitate the return of refugees to Syria and to start the reconstruction process.

“The statement that Russia is stuck is not correct, even more so coming from our colleagues in Washington. We shouldn’t forget that American soldiers are also on Syrian territory,” said Peskov.

Reporting by Polina Nikolskaya; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Andrew Osborn

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