Trump is next up for Putin
President Trump’s first faceto-face meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin is scheduled for Friday at the G-20 summit in Germany, the White House and the Kremlin said Tuesday.
The sit-down will be the first bilateral meeting between US and Russian presidents since Barack Obama met with Putin at the United Nations in September 2015. Obama and Putin also had an informal meeting on the sidelines of last year’s G-20 summit in China.
“It is planned as a fully fledged, ‘seated’ meeting,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The bilateral meeting — one in which the leaders usually shake hands and make brief public remarks — goes beyond an informal and brief “pullaside.”
Putin’s foreign-affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told Rus- sian news agencies that the two leaders, who have talked only on the phone, will meet in Hamburg, but he would not provide any details about what issues they will discuss.
The White House confirmed Friday’s meeting but said there’s “no specific agenda.”
In preparation for the get-together, Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak met with Thomas Shannon, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, in Washington, DC, on Monday.
While Trump and Putin are expected to discuss terrorism, the Syrian civil war and Russia’s incursion in Ukraine, there’s no indication Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election will be brought up.
Trump has repeatedly scoffed at charges of possible collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin, calling investigations into that question a “witch hunt.”
On Monday, Ushakov said Russia is losing patience over former President Obama’s seizure of two Kremlin properties in the United States — one on Long Island and one on the coast of Maryland — as punishment for interfering in the election.
Ushakov said if the US doesn’t soon return the properties, Russia will retaliate.
Ahead of the summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Putin in Moscow for talks on boosting ties between the two countries.
It was their third meeting of the year, and Putin bestowed the Order of St. Andrew on Xi, one of Russia’s highest honors, as further evidence of the leaders’ close relationship.
Both men are critical of the US THAAD missile-defense systems in South Korea, with Xi claiming it is “disrupting the strategic balance in the region.”
Xi’s visit came amid a flare-up of tensions in US- China relations and anxiety caused by North Korea’s latest missile launch. Xi later flew to Germany for meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“For Beijing, the goal is to present itself as a generous, cooperative and friendly power, at home and abroad,” Sebastian Heilmann, director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, told Reuters.
“It also serves to distract from politically controversial topics.”
Trump is ratcheting up pressure on Beijing to restrain North Korea and is threatening punitive trade measures that could also hit German exporters.
Xi, looking for allies, has turned to the Germans.
In a guest commentary in the German daily Die Welt on Tuesday, he called for an intensification of ties, saying the two countries should assume responsibility for peace, stability and prosperity.