The following article by Karen DeYoung, Missy Ryan and Anton Troianovski was posted on the Washington Post website July 19, 2018:
President Trump said that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin made “significant progress,” on problems in the Middle East and nuclear proliferation. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Two days after President Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian officials offered a string of assertions about what the two leaders had achieved.
“Important verbal agreements” were reached at the Helsinki meeting, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, told reporters in Moscow Wednesday, including preservation of the New START and INF agreements, major bilateral arms control treaties whose futures have been in question. Antonov also said Putin had made “specific and interesting proposals to Washington” on how the two countries could cooperate on Syria.
But officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military, scrambling since Monday to determine what Trump may have agreed to on national security issues in Helsinki, had little to no information Wednesday.