Tillerson met President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for discussions that were meant to tackle, primarily, the fight against Daesh and safe zones, but that were consumed by the chemical attack in Syria.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday the tone of the Moscow meetings had been "fairly constructive", and reflected a need for the world's two biggest nuclear powers "to maintain a dialog to search for solutions".
Trump made the comment during a joint press conference at the White House with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
The US envoy took aim at Russian Federation, saying it must "stop covering for Assad" and accused Iran of "dumping fuel on the flames of this war in Syria so that it can expand its own reach".
Any hope that the Trump administration is poised for a potentially historic rapprochement with Russian Federation has been dashed after the USA missile strike on a Syrian airbase last Thursday.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin echoed Mr Trump, saying in an interview on Russian television: "The level of trust on a working level, especially on the military level, has not improved but has rather deteriorated".
At that briefing, the official also noted, "We know the Russians have chemical expertise in-country".
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As Russian hopes of swift detente under President Donald Trump have fizzled, state media, which hailed his election win, have made a U-turn.
"We hope that the Russian government concludes that they have aligned themselves with an unreliable partner in Bashar al-Assad".
Donald Trump went on to describe U.S. relations with Russia as at an "all-time low", and Russian president Vladimir Putin said the "level of trust" had "not improved but has rather deteriorated". "And it was very, very successfully done, as you well know", he said. What's Russia's response to those words and the chemical attack, any common ground here sf.
Calling for an "objective and unbiased probe" into the chemical attack in Syria, Lavrov said Russian Federation has no intention to shield anyone responsible for the incident and repeated Russia's view that the Syrian government was not responsible for the attack.
Last week Trump ordered airstrikes on a Syrian air base in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack which killed 80 people and was described by the United States as a nerve gas attack carried out by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces. "This is just the latest use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime", he said, noting that Assad had presided over more than 50 attacks, using weapons such as cluster bombs and chlorine bombs "intended to maim and kill in the most horrific ways".
El secretario de Estado norteamericano, Rex Tillerson, a la izquierda, y el ministro ruso de Exteriores, Serguei Lavrov, antes de sus conversaciones en Moscú, Rusia, el miércoles 12 de abril de 2017. "The world's two foremost nuclear powers can not have this kind of relationship", he said at a news conference, adding that Moscow and Washington had agreed to establish a working group to identify problems and improve bilateral relations.
After Tillerson spent three hours talking with Lavrov and nearly two hours at the Kremlin with Putin, conveying Washington's demands that Moscow abandon Syria, the Russian Foreign Minister aired a long list of grievances with the United States, some dating back many years. "Frankly, Putin is backing a person that's truly an evil person", Trump said, referring to Assad. "I do not know who saw them. I think it's very bad for mankind".
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