US President Barack Obama shaking hands with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during arrivals for the G-20 summit at the Konstantin Palace in St Petersburg, Russia, yesterday. Photo: Reuters

A 15-second photo-op yesterday between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin spoke volumes – tight smiles, a businesslike handshake and little more from two leaders bitterly divided by the crisis in Syria.

Their sparse encounter outside a tsarist palace in St Petersburg at the start of a Group of 20 (G20) summit underscored the dismal state of US-Russia relations, with tensions mounting over Obama’s threatened military strike against Syria, a Russian ally.

Obama and Putin have never had anything close to personal chemistry, and there was hardly any on display as the armoured limousine carrying the US President pulled up to where Putin waited to greet arriving world leaders.

Both offered thin smiles, exchanged pleasantries and gripped hands for the cameras. Obama could be heard pronouncing the weather or the palace or both “beautiful” and then headed inside alone.

It was the only one-on-one public appearance planned between the leaders in St Petersburg, after Obama called off a separate Moscow summit in response to Russia’s granting of asylum last month to Edward Snowden, a former US spy agency contractor who had exposed secrets of American surveillance programmes.

But Syria is 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 suspected chemical weapons use is pitted squarely against Putin’s efforts to prevent such action.

The two are expected to talk informally on the summit sidelines but there was little expectation they would narrow their differences.

“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 that he touted as a signature foreign policy accomplishment early in his first term.

Scrutinising body language between the two has become a diplomatic pastime as they have engaged in some of the most awkward personal encounters of US and Russian leaders since the end of the Cold War.

At a G8 summit in Northern Ireland in June, Putin scowled his way through talks with Obama, who later likened him to a “bored kid in the back of the classroom”.

The St Petersburg summit yesterday appeared to be unfolding with similar tensions in play. A day earlier, Putin bluntly accused US Secretary of State John Kerry of lying by playing down the role of the militant group al-Qaeda among Syrian rebel forces.

Then, on the way to the summit, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, dismissed as “implausible theories” the notion put forward by Putin that anti-Assad rebels may have been to blame for the August 21 gas attack that killed hundreds of people near Damascus.

In the broadcast part of the first summit session yesterday, Obama and Putin milled around talking to other leaders but not to one another.