MOSCOW: US Secretary of State John Kerry met with Russian rights activists on Wednesday as he faced a tough balancing act between trying to find common ground with the Kremlin on Syria and signalling support for the country's embattled civil society.
On his first visit to Russia as the top US diplomat, Kerry conspicuously steered clear of criticising Moscow in an apparent attempt to soothe months of tensions after President Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin for a new term last May.
After meeting Kerry, representatives of several rights groups accused Washington of turning a blind eye to a crackdown on freedoms and prioritising cooperation with the Kremlin over human rights.
Kerry expressed admiration for Russia's rights groups who have over the past weeks wrestled with an unprecedented campaign of searches. But he earlier stressed that disputes between Moscow and Washington should not cloud ties and hurt the two countries' "larger interests."
"Russia is complicated, we all know, but vital," Kerry said at the end of his two-day visit to Moscow which included meetings with Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday.
"I just met with a group of your civil society folks who are struggling to find their voice in their own country, who are standing up to fight for what we take for granted in the United States of America," Kerry said.
He spoke after meeting some of Russia's leading rights activists including Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group and Alexander Cherkasov from Memorial.
Russian authorities have in recent weeks begun questioning non-governmental organisations and searching their offices after adopting a controversial law requiring activist groups to declare themselves "foreign agents" if their funding comes from abroad.
The main US developmental agency USAID was expelled from Russia last year, as Putin accused US groups of financing unprecedented opposition protests that shook Moscow in late 2011.
But Kerry, who has agreed with Lavrov to work together to overcome sharp differences and find an end to the bloodshed in Syria, suggested that bilateral disputes should not harm ties, arguing that the two countries should not "get lost in some of these other issues."
"The key is not to let them become so personalised or so much an impediment to the larger goal and to the broader agenda and to our larger interests," he told reporters after talks with Putin in the Kremlin on Tuesday.
Ties between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated dramatically since Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third term last May on a wave of anti-US rhetoric.
Putin has all but dismantled any lingering legacy of his younger predecessor Dmitry Medvedev who had briefly raised hopes of a liberal transformation of Russia and pushed a "reset" of ties with US.
Weeks after the inauguration, Putin imposed a clampdown on civil society, signing off on a raft of laws in what critics described as a bid to quash dissent.
Putin's top critic Alexei Navalny faces up to 10 years in prison on what he says are trumped-up charges, while more than two dozen activists also face jail time over their role in an opposition rally.
Last year, Russia passed a hugely controversial law banning all adoptions by US nationals in retaliation for US legislation targeting Russian officials believed to have been implicated in human rights abuses.
But Kerry, who appeared to tiptoe around contentious issues like the adoption ban, said that Russia was still a country in transition and chose to play up cooperation with the Kremlin, which supports the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"I think we hopefully found a cooperative way forward, to try, I can't guarantee that we can, to try to bring people together to deal effectively with Syria," he said.
"Russia is enormously cooperative, has been and is today, with respect to North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan."
Some respected rights activists accused Kerry of glossing over the crackdown on freedoms.
"Kerry said lots of good words," veteran rights campaigner Lev Ponomaryov told reporters. "But these are standard words which everyone says."
Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group noted that unlike in Soviet times, visiting US dignitaries were now first meeting with the country's leaders and only then with rights activists.
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