The United States and Russia issued a joint statement on Saturday agreeing to cooperate to defeat the ISIS terror army, and backing a set of principles related to forcing a resolution to the bloody civil war in Syria.
The statement confirms that Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met ‘on the sidelines’ of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Da Nang, Vietnam.
It also says Russia and the U.S. are committed to keeping lines of communication open in order to ‘prevent dangerous incidents between American and Russian military forces’ while the U.S. and its allies are fighting ISIS.
Trump and Putin both attended the APEC leaders’ summit on Saturday, and were pictured talking and shaking hands before it began.
Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin talked ‘on the sidelines’ of the APEC summit in Danang, Vietnam on Saturday, according to a ‘joint statement’ issued in Russian by the Kremlin
Trump did most of the talking, according to a person who witnessed the conversation.
An English translation of a Russian-language version of the statement issued afterward says the two leaders ‘confirmed their determination to defeat ISIS in Syria.’
It also confirmed that the U.S. and Russia agree that ‘that the conflict in Syria cannot have a military solution.’
Instead, the White House and the Kremlin are committed to forcing Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad to engage in a political transition out of power, as dictated by a resolution the United Nations Security Council passed in December 2015.
The Kremlin published a Russian-language ‘joint statement’ on its website Saturday afternoon while Trump and Putin were attending the APEC meeting.
As of an hour later, the White House had yet to confirm that the statement was genuine, or release its own version in English.
But it was negotiated behind the scenes in Da Nang by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had told reporters on Friday that Trump and Putin would not meet in Vietnam.
‘Regarding a Putin meeting, there was never a meeting confirmed, and there will not be one that takes place due to scheduling conflicts on both sides,’ Sanders said aboard Air Force One.
‘There is no formal meeting or anything scheduled for them.’
‘Now, they’re going to be in the same place,’ she allowed. ‘Are they going to bump into each other and say hello? Certainly possible and likely.’
The press was largely shut out of the Intercontinental Da Nang Sun Palace resort where 21 world leaders met on Saturday.
American news photographers were not allowed in the building despite a longstanding arrangement with the White House permitting them to take pictures at pre-approved times of the day.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the state-run Sputnik news website that the joint statement was prepared specifically to go along with the Vietnam summit, suggesting the White House knew Trump and Putin would meet there.