Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 13, 2018
‘We do not participate in Twitter diplomacy’: Russia responds to Trump
November 3, 2017
In the wake of President Trump’s tweet taunting Russia while promising a missile attack on Moscow’s ally Syria, Russian politicians and officials are jumping at a chance to show they are the more mature and serious party. Here’s how Russian officials from the president on down have responded to Trump.
President Vladimir Putin did not address the tweets directly while greeting new foreign ambassadors to Moscow at the Kremlin. But he reiterated his frequent call for global stability — which can only be accomplished, in the Kremlin’s view, by giving Russia a prominent role in a “multipolar” rather than U.S.-led world order.
“Indeed, the state of things in the world cannot but provoke concern. The situation in the world is increasingly chaotic. Nevertheless, we hope that common sense will prevail in the end and that international relations will become more constructive — that the whole global system will become more stable and predictable.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to the tweets in comments to Russian journalists. While he dismissed Trump’s Twitter diplomacy, he left unmentioned that Russia’s own diplomats in London are no stranger to it.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova quickly took to Facebook, wondering whether an American strike would only be a pretext for erasing all evidence of a chemical-weapons attack that Russia has described as staged.
“Smart missiles should fly in the direction of terrorists and not a legal government that has been fighting for several years against international terrorism on its territory.… Or is the whole idea to quickly wipe away the traces of a provocation by striking them with smart missiles, so that international inspectors would have nothing left to find in terms of evidence?” (Source: Washington Post)
Published in the Waterloo Region Record