US secretary of state John Kerry has landed in Sochi, where he is due to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin later on Tuesday. The trip is Kerry’s first visit to Russia since the start of the Ukraine crisis.

Kerry will also hold talks with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. The two laid flowers at a memorial to victims of the second world war in the Black Sea resort before holding talks.



“This trip is part of our ongoing effort to maintain direct lines of communication with senior Russian officials and to ensure US views are clearly conveyed,” state department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a written statement. Discussion is likely to focus on Ukraine, where sporadic fighting continues despite a ceasefire agreement, as well as on Syria and Iran.



The Russian foreign ministry said: “We continue to underline that we are ready for cooperation with the US on the basis of equality, non-interference in internal affairs, and that Russian interests are taken into account without attempting to exert pressure on us.”

The US has placed several rounds of sanctions on Russia over its actions in Ukraine.



Dmitry Peskov, the Russian president’s spokesman, said a final decision on the meeting with Putin had not been taken yet.

After his stopover in Sochi, Kerry will travel on to Turkey where he is due to attend a meeting of Nato foreign ministers, and will then return to Washington for a summit of Gulf Arab leaders that President Barack Obama is hosting at Camp David.

Kerry has not been to Russia since May 2013, well before the revolution and subsequent Russian intervention in Ukraine began. The conflict has caused the biggest crisis in relations between Russia and the west since the cold war.

Russia believes that the US is meddling in Ukraine, while Washington has pointed to mounting evidence of Russian military involvement in the east of the country.

“Russia has engaged in a rather remarkable period of the most overt and extensive propaganda exercise that I’ve seen since the very height of the cold war,” Kerry said in February. “And they have been persisting in their misrepresentations, lies, whatever you want to call them, about their activities to my face, to the face of others, on many different occasions.”

On Monday the Russian foreign ministry said that US-Russian relations are enduring a difficult period “because of the targeted unfriendly actions of Washington”.

“Unfairly blaming Russia for the crisis in Ukraine, which was actually in the main provoked by the US itself, Obama’s administration in 2014 went down the road of ruining bilateral links, announced a policy of ‘isolating’ our country on the international stage, and demanded support for its confrontational steps from the countries that traditionally follow Washington.”

Putin has accused the US of organising the Maidan protests that toppled former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, and has criticised the presence of US military trainers in Ukraine. Although the 300 US trainers are operating in the west of the country, well away from the conflict zone, Russia has questioned their purpose. Interfax quoted an unnamed Russian official as stating that the issue of US military assistance to Ukraine would be raised with Kerry.



During a major military parade on Saturday to mark 70 years since victory in the second world war, Putin criticised “attempts to build a unipolar world” – a clear swipe at the US, though he did not name the country.

“Over the past decade, we are seeing more frequent attempts to ignore the basic principles of international cooperation,” said Putin.

Western leaders mainly boycotted the parade in protest at Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

German chancellor Angela Merkel travelled to Moscow on Sunday to pay her respects at a war memorial, but used a meeting with Putin to criticise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and urged Russia to use its influence over the separatists in Ukraine to encourage them to abide by the ceasefire.

Putin said the Ukrainian government bore most of the responsibility for ensuring peace.

There will be a number of other items on the agenda in Sochi, including Russia’s announcement last month that it would lift a five-year ban on delivery of the S-300 air defence missile system to Iran. Moscow insists the S-300 is a defensive system which will have no negative impact on the security of Israel or other regional players. The White House, however, remains worried about the deal.

After his meeting with Merkel, Putin also criticised what he described as western double standards, comparing the recent events in Yemen with those in Ukraine last year. He said both were coups, but the response from the west was very different.

“If we apply different standards to the same kind of events, we will never be able to agree on anything,” said Putin.