After months of anticipation, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet on Monday July 16, 2018, to put to the test the US president’s ambition to forge a personal bond with the Kremlin chief.
/ AFP PHOTO / SPUTNIK / Mikhail KLIMENTYEV
HELSINKI, Finland (AFP) — After months of anticipation, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet Monday to put to the test the US president’s ambition to forge a personal bond with the Kremlin chief.
If Trump’s instinct is right and he finds common ground with Putin, then the pair’s Helsinki Summit may take the heat out of some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts.
But the Washington-Moscow rivalry has a long history and there are there many points of friction that could yet spoil Trump’s hoped-for beautiful friendship.
With the foes at loggerheads over Syria, Ukraine, pipeline policy, espionage and election interference, even Trump cautioned: “I’m not going with high expectations.”
The billionaire property magnate has been president for 18 months, while the 65-year-old former KGB officer has run Russia for the past 18 years.
The 72-year-old president nevertheless has a high opinion of his ability to woo tough opponents, such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, whom he met at a summit last month.
“I think it’s a good thing to meet. I do believe in meetings,” Trump insisted in an interview with CBS News that aired before he touched down in Helsinki.
In the same interview, Trump admitted that Russia remains a foe, but he put Moscow on a par with China and the European Union as economic and diplomatic rivals.
The Kremlin has also played down hopes that the odd couple will emerge from their first formal one-on-one summit having resolved the issues poisoning relations.
Putin, who played host at the World Cup final in Moscow on Sunday and was due to arrive in Finland later Monday, has remained terse in the run up to the summit.
But on Friday his adviser Yuri Ushakov also played down expectations, saying: “The state of bilateral relations is very bad…. We have to start to set them right.”
Before coming to Europe, Trump predicted his meeting with Putin could be the “easiest” stage of a tour that included stops in Brussels and Britain.
But he told CBS that he was going into it with “low expectations.”
Trump also defended his decision to hold the meeting after opposition Democrats, and Republican Senator John McCain, said the summit should be canceled in the wake of the indictments.
“I believe it’s really good. So having meetings with Russia, China, North Korea, I believe in it. Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe some good will come out,” the president said in broadcast excerpts. The rest of the interview will air on Monday.
Trump told CBS that “Russia is a foe in certain respects,” and also named the European Union and China as “foes” economically, over trade practices for which Washington has imposed sanctions, sparking a trade war.
US National Security Adviser John Bolton said that, after the indictments, Trump “can put this on the table and say, this is a serious matter that we need to talk about.”
He told ABC’s “This Week” that “it’s very important that the president has a direct one-on-one conversation” with Putin, and European leaders have expressed support for it.
© Agence France-Presse
