President Barack Obama said he and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev discussed Afghanistan, Iran and Syria, among other topics, at their meeting on Saturday.
Obama said he and Medvedev "reaffirmed our intention to work and shape a common response so we can move Iran to follow its international obligations when it comes to its nuclear program."
Russia's government has been cool to any new U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran. On Tuesday, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in a report that Tehran had worked on developing a nuclear bomb design and may still be conducting such research.
Obama gave no details about the discussion on Syria. On Afghanistan, he said they discussed the importance of regional powers supporting the government in Kabul.
In the meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Medvedev said there was a large gap between Washington's and Moscow's positions on U.S. plans for a missile defense system based in Europe.
"We have agreed to continue the search for possible solutions, with the understanding of the fact that our positions still remain far apart," Medvedev told reporters.
Obama congratulated Russia on its move toward membership of the World Trade Organization, which it is expected to join next month. Medvedev was effusive in his thanks for what he called Obama's "active and engaged" support for Russia's WTO bid.
"We have not been offered such support by (previous) U.S. administrations before," he said in remarks translated from Russian. "And maybe this is the reason why it took us since 1993 to join this organization", Reuters reports.
"I would like to express full satisfaction with how our work with President Obama is being built," Medvedev said after the talks with his US counterpart on the sidelines of the APEC summit. "The main thing that distinguishes our relations is trust. Only through trust-based relations can difficult issues be resolved. We've already resolved some of them, but many more are ahead.”"President Medvedev and I have, I think, successfully established the reset of US-Russia relationships – the US-Russian relationship – over the last several years," said Barack Obama. "And it has borne concrete fruit in the form of the New START Treaty, the 123 Agreement, the work that we did together imposing sanctions on Iran, and most recently, the efforts that we’ve made on Russia’s WTO accession," Russia Today reports.
