Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov downplayed the importance of unofficial meetings at the G20 summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin by comparing the pair of world leaders to kindergartners mingling on the first day of school.
“When you are bought by your parents to a kindergarten do you mix with the people who are waiting in the same room to start going to a classroom?” he asked during the Friday morning interview on NBC.
Trump and Putin met once for a handshake when the summit began and then a second time for an official bilateral meeting, but there was rampant speculation following the international summit that they may have engaged in additional secret discussions.
Lavrov echoed the White House account of a third, initially undisclosed, meeting between Putin and Trump that took place over dinner in Hamburg, Germany, but added other additional meetings might have taken place.
“They might have met even much more than just three times,” he said. “Maybe they went to the toilet together.”
While Lavrov laughed off speculation surrounding secret meetings between Trump and Putin, he spoke out adamantly against the U.S. presence in Syria, arguing there is a double standard that governs U.S. policy toward Russia.
Lavrov also dismissed the idea of pushing for regime change in North Korea and disputed U.S. intelligence agencies’ claims that the hermit kingdom recently launched an intercontinental ballistic missile.
“We do not believe in regime change anywhere,” Lavrov said. “Our objective data we received from our radars located just on the border with North Korea and according to that data it is not an intercontinental missile.”
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