Putin says Russia, U.S. nearing Syria pact

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia and the United States are close to reaching an agreement on Syria despite differences about how best to resolve the conflict, Bloomberg news agency reported on Friday.

In an interview two days before a G20 meeting in China with U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders, Mr. Putin said ongoing talks between Moscow and Washington were very difficult but on the right track.

“In my view, we are gradually moving in the right direction,” Mr. Putin was quoted as saying in a transcript of the interview released by the Kremlin. “I do not exclude that in the near future we may agree on something and show this agreement to the world community. For now, it is too early to say, but it seems to me that we are proceeding, as I already said, in the right direction.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov failed to reach a breakthrough deal on military cooperation and a nationwide cessation of hostilities in Syria last week, but said teams from both sides would try to finalise details in Geneva.

DNC hack

The Russian President, meanwhile, told Bloomberg that he did not know who was behind the hacking of U.S. Democratic Party organisations but the information uncovered was important.

It might be impossible to establish who engineered the release of sensitive Democratic Party e-mails but it was not done by the Russian government, he said. “Does it even matter who hacked this data,” Mr. Putin asked. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public. There’s no need to distract attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it.”