US PRESIDENT Trump and Russian President Putin held a historic meeting in Finland yesterday in which they talked about joint cooperation with Israel in dealing with Syria.
At the joint press conference in response to a question on Syria, Trump said: ‘We have worked with Israel long and hard over many years, many decades. Never has anyone, any country been closer than we are.
‘President Putin also spoke with Israel and we both spoke to (Israeli PM) Bibi Netanyahu and they would like to do certain things with respect to Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. ‘So in that respect we absolutely would like to work in order to help Israel and Israel will be working with us.
‘So both countries would work jointly. When you look at all the progress in certain sections with the eradication of ISIS we are about 98 or 99 per cent there, and other things that have taken place that we have done. Frankly, Russia has helped us in certain respects.
‘Creating safety for Israel is something that both President Putin and I would like to see very much.’ He added: ‘Our militaries actually do get along. Our militaries actually have gotten along probably better than our political leaders for years. They do get along very well and they do coordinate in Syria and other places.’
President Putin then talked about his role in stopping refugees from travelling to Europe. He said: ‘Yesterday, I discussed this with French President Emmanuel Macron and we reached an agreement and together with European countries including France will step up this effort.
‘On our behalf we will provide military cargo aircraft to deliver humanitarian cargo and today I brought up this issue with President Trump, I think there is plenty of things to look into. ‘The crucial thing here is that there is a huge amount of refugees that are in Turkey, in Lebanon and in Jordan. They stay on the border adjacent to Syrian.
‘If we help them on the border, the migrationary pressure on the European states will drop many fold.’ Both the US and Russian presidents stated that they wanted to cooperate in the pursuit of ‘common interests’.
