You're reading: Tillerson’s remark about Ukraine at G7 summit stokes fears about US support

Controversial remarks now seem to come thick and fast from U.S. officials, sometimes at the rate of two a day.

For instance, during the G7 summit in Italy on April 10-11, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reported to have asked his European counterparts “why U.S. taxpayers should be interested in Ukraine.”

The offhand remark baffled many and alarmed some in Ukraine.

State Department spokesman R.C. Hammond later told news agency Bloomberg that Tillerson’s remark had been a “rhetorical device,” implying that U.S. taxpayers should indeed be interested in Ukraine.

Kremlin denials

But Tillerson’s remark relit smouldering fears in Ukraine that the administration of U.S. President Donald J. Trump will be less supportive of Ukraine due to Trump’s liking for Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin. When running for U.S. president, Trump complimented Putin on a number of occasions, calling him “very much of a leader” and “a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

Those fears were assuaged somewhat on April 6 when Trump ordered a U.S. missile strike on an airbase of Putin ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

The attack was a response to a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria’s Idlib province at the beginning of April. The attack, in which the nerve agent sarin is thought to have been used, killed nearly 100 people, many of them children, and caused international outrage.

Moscow denied the Syrian government had carried out the attack, and claimed, without offering any evidence, that the sarin had been released when a rebel weapons depot had been hit by an airstrike. Putin later said the allegations against his Syrian ally were “boring” during a joint press conference with Italian President Sergio Mattarella on April 10.

Sanctions remain

As U.S.-Russia relations sour still further, it also looks like the United States is not planning to reduce or remove its sanctions on Russia (something many in Ukraine feared Trump would do).

The sanctions were put in place by the previous U.S. administration in response to Russia’s invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and its fomenting of a war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

“There’s been no change of the status of the situation in Ukraine or Crimea,” Tillerson said in an interview with ABC’s This Week program on April 9, “And those sanctions will remain until those issues are addressed.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault also defended Ukraine in a reaction to Tillerson’s question about why should Americans care about Ukraine.

“American taxpayers ought to want a European Union that’s strong politically, strong from a security point of view, and strong economically,” he said at the G7 summit.

Talks with Russia

Tillerson is now in Moscow for talks with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The U.S. secretary of state is the first member of Trump’s cabinet to meet with a Kremlin official.

Tillerson told ABC’s This Week that he hopes “Russia is thinking carefully about its continued alliance with Bashar al-Assad, because every time one of these horrific attacks occurs, it draws Russia closer into some level of responsibility.”

Another gaffe

Tillerson’s loose remark about Ukraine was not the only gaffe by a U.S. official reported that day: On April 11, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in an apparent effort to shame Syrian dictator Bashar-al Assad, said that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” during World War II.

This caused an outcry from journalists and the general public – although Nazi Germany didn’t use chemical weapons on the battlefield, Hitler used poison gas to murder millions in death camps.

Spicer then compounded his gaffe by referring to the Nazis’ death camps as “Holocaust centers” when reporters in the briefing room noted the Holocaust was an example of Hitler’s use of chemical weapons.