Change on the horizon

Trump secures a chance to shift the US Supreme Court to the right as Justice Anthony Kennedy, the tie-breaking vote between the bench’s liberal and conservative judges, has announced his retirement.

MOSCOW: A long-awaited first summit between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will take place in Helsinki on July 16, the Kremlin and the White House said.

The talks come as Russia’s relations with the West languish at levels not seen since the Cold War and will likely provoke criticism for Trump at home, where investigators are probing possible collusion between his presidential campaign team and Moscow.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, as well as Moscow’s backing of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the Syrian conflict will also loom large.

Next month’s dialogue in Finland will see the two leaders discuss “the current state and prospects for development of Russian-US relations”, said the Kremlin yesterday.

A statement from the White House said the men would also broach various national security issues.

Trump earlier said he expected the discussions to be wide-ranging.

“I think we’ll be talking about Syria. I think we’ll be talking about Ukraine. I think we’ll be talking about many other subjects. And we’ll see what happens. You never know about meetings, what happens, right?” he said.

“I think a lot of good things can come with meetings with people.”

The announcement came after Trump’s hawkish national security adviser John Bolton met Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, where he was given a warm welcome before the two discussed details of the summit.

“Your visit to Moscow gives us hope that we can at least take the first step to reviving full-blown ties between our states,” Putin told Bolton at the Kremlin after the two smiled and shook hands for the cameras.

Bolton said there were areas for cooperation between the two countries, but added that the lifting of US sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 would not be on the table at the summit.

Both sides have played down expectations of what the talks could hope to produce in concrete terms, saying the fact that Trump and Putin were meeting at all was an achievement in itself.