Hours after appearing on "The Tonight Show" and criticizing Russia President Barack Obama has announced that he is cancelling a scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was to take place in Moscow prior to the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The president still plans on attending the summit. White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the Obama administration decided to cancel the meeting because they had "reached the conclusion that there is not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda with Russia."
"Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last 12 months, we have informed the Russian government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda," a statement from the White House said. "Russia's disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship."
Political analysts in Russia believe that President Obama is bowing to the pressure of a "cold war lobby" in Congress by canceling the one on one with Putin, according to the Voice of Russia.
"This indicates that Obama is failing to lead relations with Putin toward improvement," Sergei Markov, director of the Institute for Political Studies, said. "Even though the U.S. president is trying to do so, he clearly lacks the power. Obama is now under strong pressure from the 'cold war' lobby that exists in the U.S. Congress and Senate and it does not let the American president improve relations with Russia."
The two countries have been at odds over a myriad of issues lately including how to deal with the situation in Syria, a proposed American missile defense system and the recent actions to infringe upon gay rights within Russia, according to the New York Times.
Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser, told the Associated Press that Russia's decision to grant asylum to Snowden was only the latest in a long line of issues that have weakened the relationship between the two former Cold War foes. Rhodes said it had become clear that no progress in any of those issues would be made if the two leaders met.
"We'll still work with Russia on issues where we can find common ground, but it was the unanimous view of the president and his national security team that a summit did not make sense in the current environment," Rhodes said.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., had been urging the president to cancel his meeting with Putin if his government decided to grant asylum to Snowden for a while, according to the New York Times.
"The president clearly mad the right decision," Schumer said. "President Putin is acting like a schoolyard bully and doesn't deserve the respect a bilateral summit would have accorded him."
