"I am here today because President Trump is committed to improving this relationship," Pompeo said in brief remarks before his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the resort town of Sochi. That meeting lasted approximately an hour and a half, according to the State Department.
"We have differences and each country will protect its interests, look out for its own people. But we are not adversaries on every issue and I hope that we can find places where we have a set of overlapping interests and can truly begin to build out strong relationships, at least on those particular issues," the US secretary of state said Tuesday.
Pompeo noted that the two sides have worked cooperatively on issues like counterterrorism in the past and expressed hope that the two nations can "get our teams and begin to build out a common set of understandings" on arms control and nonproliferation. He added that he was sure there would be "frank discussions" and "places where we just can't find common ground."
"We've worked closely with you on the counterterrorism in my time in the executive branch, very successfully," he said. "We've saved American lives, we've saved Russian lives as a result of that good, honest, sincere work together."
"I hope this good faith effort on the part of our two nations that is directed by President Trump and President Putin will stabilize the relationship and put it back on a trajectory that I think will be good not only for each of our two countries, our two peoples, but for the world as well," Pompeo said.
Lavrov, also speaking ahead the joint meeting, said he hoped the two parties could "work out specific proposals aimed at taking the US-Russia relations out of the current sad state that they find themselves in, due to various objective and subjective reasons."
The Russian foreign minister said the two countries "have a lot of problems that require both urgent action and developing long-term sustainable solutions. This concerns strategic stability, the anti-terrorism track and the resolution of various crises in different regions in the world."
Pompeo, who is expected to meet with Putin for the first time later in the day on Tuesday, is in Russia as the US faces escalating foreign policy situations around the world. The US secretary of state canceled a stop in Moscow on Monday and instead went to Brussels to brief European allies on intel about Iran.
State Department special representative for Iran Brian Hook said the topic of Iran, specifically its "destabilizing role in Syria," was expected to come up in Pompeo's meetings in Russia.
"We know that it is in Russia's interest to stabilize Syria and as long as Iran is using Syria as a missile platform to advance its foreign policy objectives, it will not be stable," Hook said Monday in Brussels.
Pompeo is also expected to discuss a broad range of multilateral and bilateral issues, including arms control, Ukraine, Venezuela and North Korea, a senior State Department official told reporters last week.
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