Credit: REUTERS/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Pool
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US President Barak Obama and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, divided by the crisis in Syria, have met on Thursday, September 5, at the tsarist palace in St. Petersburg at the start of a Group of 20 (G20) summit. No progress towards mutual understudying has been recorded so far.

The leaders of the two countries offered thin smiles, exchanged pleasantries and shook hands for the cameras. US President could be heard pronouncing the weather or the palace or both "beautiful" and then headed inside alone.

What makes this meeting notable is that it is the first one-on-one public appearance of Putin and Obama after US leader called off a separate Moscow summit in response to Russia's granting of asylum to a former US spy agency contractor, Edward Snowden, who exposed secrets of American surveillance programs.

Syria, however, has been the biggest source of strain in St. Petersburg, where Obama's effort to rally world support for a military strike against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over alleged chemical weapons use was pitted against Putin's efforts to prevent such action.

"We've kind of hit a wall"

The two leaders were to talk informally during the summit, but the expectations that they would find a common ground were low.

"We've kind of hit a wall," Obama told a news conference in Stockholm on Wednesday when asked what had gone wrong with the "reset" in relations with Russia. In the broadcast part of the first summit session on Thursday, Obama and Putin milled around talking to other leaders but not to one another.

On Friday, Obama plans to meet Russian human rights activists to highlight US discontent with the new are said to violate gay rights and restrain non-governmental organizations. That is likely to be taken by Putin as a swipe at him and meddling in Russia's domestic affairs.