Donald Trump to hold summit with Vladimir Putin
Donald Trump will hold a summit with Vladimir Putin in the near future to discuss North Korea, nuclear arms control and Russian interference in the US election, Russian and US officials announced Wednesday.
The announcement came amid reports that North Korea is making rapid improvements to its nuclear research facility, calling into doubt the progress toward “total denuclearisation” that Mr Trump claimed after his meeting this month with Kim Jong-un.
The time and place of US and Russian leaders' meeting will be announced on Thursday, US national security adviser John Bolton said at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday evening. He met with Mr Putin in the Kremlin earlier that day to hash out the details.
Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said the summit would take place in a third country that was a “very comfortable place for both Russia and the United States”. It could end with a joint statement outlining a plan to improve relations or undertake joint actions to “facilitate international stability and security”.
Previous reports have named Vienna and Helsinki as locations for the summit.
Washington and Moscow have been flirting with the possibility of holding such a meeting for months, but dispatching Mr Bolton to Moscow would appear to show how invested Mr Trump is in the idea.
Yet his decision to hold a high-profile sit-down with Mr Putin is sure to raise eyebrows on the home front as the investigation into his potential collusion with Russia churns on. While the two presidents have already met twice, both those sit-downs happened on the sidelines of international events, rather than at a bilateral summit.
Mr Bolton dismissed the idea that such a meeting would “prove some nexus between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin,” arguing that the pair could agree on constructive solutions even amid the fraught bilateral relationship.
“The president determined that despite the political ploys in the United States, direct communication is in the interest of the United States, in the interest of Russia, and in the interest of peace and security around the world,” he said.
It's far from clear what significant agreements if any the two leaders will be able to reach, with the United States and Russia frequently criticising each other's approaches to Ukraine, Syria and North Korea.
Mr Bolton discussed arms control with Mr Putin, including the expiration of an anti-ballistic missile treaty that has been a bone of contention, and this was among the topics that could come up at the summit, he said.
Asked whether Mr Trump might offer concessions around the Ukraine crisis, he insisted that the United States does not recognise the annexation of Crimea and the “sanctions will stay in place”.
Mr Putin told the US envoy during their talks that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election, according to Mr Ushakov.
The news of this exchange was made all the more piquant by Mr Bolton's Daily Telegraph article last year saying that Mr Putin had lied to Mr Trump about the election meddling, which Mr Bolton called an “act of war”.
When pressed about the article, Mr Bolton would only say that he and Mr Putin “did indeed talk about the Russian interference in the elections and I suspect that it will be a subject of conversation between the two presidents as well”.
Mr Bolton said he also met with Fifa head Gianni Infantino during his Moscow trip “just to get an early jump on our preparations” for the 2026 World Cup, which was awarded to the United States, Canada and Mexico earlier this month.
During the open part of his talks with Mr Putin, he reportedly said he was hoping to hear how Russia “handled the World Cup so successfully”.
