Trump’s Putin invite
White House floated as venue
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump proposed meeting Vladimir Putin at the White House in a March phone call, the Kremlin has said in a fresh revelation about a conversation that stirred controversy over Mr Trump’s friendly tone toward the Russian leader amid mounting tensions with the West.
After the March 20 phone call – in which Mr Trump congratulated Mr Putin (inset) for a re-election victory in a vote widely criticised as not free and fair – Mr Trump told reporters that the two leaders had discussed a possible meeting to discuss Syria, Ukraine, North Korea and “the arms race”. He did not mention any meeting venues at that time.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that “a number of potential venues, including the White House” were discussed.
A Kremlin aide, Yury Ushakov, disclosed the White House invitation in comments to Russian journalists.
Summit
“If everything will be all right, I hope the Americans will not backawayfromtheirownproposal to discuss the possibility of holding a summit,” Mr Ushakov said, according to the state news agency RIA Novosti.
“When our presidents spoke on the phone, it was Trump who proposed holding the first meeting in Washington, in the White House.”
He added that no preparations for such a meeting have been made, according to Russian news agencies.
If a White House visit did come together, it would be Mr Putin’s first since 2005 – when Moscow and the West were on better terms.
Those relations have been in freefall since the nerve-agent poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain on March 4. British authorities blamed the attack on Russia. Mr Trump was slow to back their assessment, but the United States on March 26 joined countries in Europe and elsewhere in retaliatory expulsions of Russian diplomats.
The Kremlin denies it had anything to do with the nerve-agent attack and has ordered tit-for-tat expulsions. The former spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, remain hospitalised.
The added detail that Mr Trump floated a White House meeting with Mr Putin renews debate over a presidential phone call that came in the midst of that political storm and drew broad criticism last month.
In the March 20 call, Mr Trump congratulated Mr Putin on his re-election to a fourth term two days earlier and did not raise the nerve-agent attack. His national security advisers had urged him to condemn the Skripal poisoning and included an instruction in his briefing book that said, “do not congratulate”, officials familiar with the call told ‘The Washington Post’ afterwards.
Many international observers described Mr Putin’s re-election victory as a sham. Senator John McCain said Mr Trump’s congratulations for Mr Putin “insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election”.
Mr Trump shot back on Twitter: “Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Leon Aron, a resident scholar and the director of Russian studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he was stunned by reports that Mr Trump so willingly suggested a White House meeting. “Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?” Mr Aron said. “It’s really mind-boggling. I’m usually not this emotional.” Such summits are “a very precious commodity” for Russian presidents, boosting their popularity at home, and should be offered only as a reward, Mr
Aron said. He noted that in addition to the spy-poisoning episode, Mr Pu- tin last month bragged about the strength of his country’s nuclear weapons in a nationalistic speech that was accompanied by an animated video depicting warheads aimed at Florida. The Kremlin also scheduled the presidential election to coincide with the anniversary of Russia’s formal annexation of Crimea.
Acceptable
If Mr Trump meets with Mr Putin as an equal given these events, Mr Aron said, he is sending the message that it is acceptable to “kill more people, seize more territory”.
Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor who was the US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, said Mr Trump should meet with Mr Putin only if “such a summit would put pressure on both countries to achieve some tangible outcome in America’s national interest”.
“Right now, it’s very hard to see what those might be,” Mr McFaul said. “It’s not even clear to me that diplomats in our two countries are working together on any issue of mutual interest at this time. Especially given Putin’s recent behaviour in the world, a summit that just gives Putin a smiley photo op in the Oval Office does not serve American national interests.”
The White House sought to play down the meeting proposal. “As the president himself confirmed on March 20, hours after his last call with President Putin, the two had discussed a bilateral meeting in the ‘nottoo-distant future’ at a number of potential venues, including the White House,” Ms Sanders said in a statement after Mr Ushakov’s comments. “We have nothing further to add at this time.” Alina Polyakova, a fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, said Mr Trump doesn’t seem to realise the policy implications of proposing such a meeting. (© The Washington Post)