The wait is over: President-elect Donald Trump finally announced his nominee for secretary of state Tuesday morning: Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO and official “friend” of Russia.
In June 2013, Tillerson and other oil company executives were awarded the Order of Friendship by President Vladimir Putin—a high honor previously bestowed upon a former basketball coach in Ohio and a Russian art collector in Minnesota. Tillerson received the award after signing an agreement in 2011 with OAO Rosneft, a Russian state-owned oil company that gave ExxonMobil and Rosneft access to Russia’s rich Arctic energy resources. (That relationship became more complicated when the United States slapped Russia with sanctions over its annexation of Crimea and interference in Ukraine in 2014.)
Watch Putin announce the award and declare a new period of “full-fledged cooperation” in this video (above), published originally in full by the Kremlin.
