Before Tillerson traveled to Moscow, he said this at the G-7 summit:

Mr Tillerson said Russia has aligned itself with the Assad regime, Iran and Hezbollah and asked “is that a long-term alliance that serves Russia’s interests?” He also urged Russia to realign itself with the US, other allies in the West [bold mine-DL] and those in the Middle East that are working to resolve the Syrian crisis.

Other governments typically don’t want to be lectured on what their real interests are by officials from a government that has consistently opposed them on one international issue after another, and the same is true of Russia. Urging Moscow to “realign” with the U.S. and our Western allies will be interpreted as a call to abandon what they perceive as their interests in the region in exchange for nothing. The demand will be rejected, and by making the demand Tillerson ensures the further souring relations between our governments. Successful diplomacy doesn’t begin by issuing unrealistic demands of the other side. Between the attack on the Syrian government last week and Tillerson’s remarks since then, his meetings with Lavrov are bound to be completely unproductive.

Successive U.S. administrations have assumed that they know Russia’s interests better than the Russians do, and each one has discovered that telling Moscow what its “real” interests are always make Moscow less cooperative rather than more. When dealing with many other states, we don’t always make the mistake of presuming to know the other side’s interests better than they do, but when it comes to Russia our officials routinely fail to understand that they can’t make Moscow dramatically change its foreign policy just by hectoring them about it. If it is possible to get Russia to change course on a specific issue, that is going to be achieved by offering them some positive incentive for altering their position, but there appears to be no interest in this administration to make such an offer.