Trump is right to say US-Russia relations have ‘tremendous potential’ – Gorbachev

The phone call between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump was very important as Russia and US must maintain dialogue, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president and one of the signatories of the INF treaty, has said.

The two leaders talked on the phone of Friday, discussing nuclear non-proliferation, North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine and bilateral trade among other things.

“This isn’t yet how relations between such powers as Russia and the US must be shaped like. But it’s important. It’s dialogue,” Gorbachev told RIA Novosti, as Moscow and Washington are going through the roughest period in their relations since the fall of the USSR.

In 1987, then-Soviet President Gorbachev and his US counterpart, Ronald Reagan, signed the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which banned the two countries from having ground-based missiles with a range between 500km and 5,500km.

The deal remained one of the cornerstones of international security for decades, until the Trump administration announced the unilateral withdrawal by the US from it in early February. The Kremlin said that one of the things that Putin and Trump discussed on the phone was the possibility of reaching a new version of the INF agreement that would also incorporate China.

Gorbachev markedly pointed out that the phone conversation had been initiated by the US.

What’s also important is the public statement made by Trump that relations between our countries have great potential. This is certainly the case.

Trump was very positive in his comments about the phone call with Putin, which he described as “long and very good.”

“Tremendous potential for a good/great relationship with Russia, despite what you read and see in the Fake News Media,” the US leader tweeted.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Gorbachev has been internationally praised for his liberal reforms and for his efforts to end the Cold War and improve relations with the US. Reagan acknowledged that his Soviet counterpart “deserves most of the credit" for the drastic changes that happened in the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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