Trump to meet Putin

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet on July 16 in Helsinki, both of their governments announced Thursday, setting the stage for a high-profile attempt to soothe tensions between the United States and Russia.

Trump and Putin have pursued the meeting in hopes of moving beyond friction over Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere.

“We’re looking forward to it. If we could all get along, it would be great. The world has to start getting along,” Trump said during a visit to

Wisconsin on Thursday. The day before, he said they would discuss Syria, Ukraine and “many other subjects.”

The summit location and date were announced in synchronized statements from Moscow and Washington, with the White House saying the two presidents will “discuss relations between the United States and Russia and a range of national security issues.”

Shortly before the summit date and venue were announced, Trump took to Twitter, relaying that Russia continues to deny interfering in the 2016 election and airing grievances regarding the probe of special counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Putin’s government and Trump’s campaign.

“Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” Trump wrote as part of tweets in which he also disparaged former FBI Director James Comey and once again claimed that the investigation is tainted by partisan bias.

Finland, officially neutral during the Cold War and not a NATO member, shares a border with Russia, and its president, Sauli Niinisto, has fostered a relationship with Putin.

Niinisto said the agenda would be decided in coming weeks, adding that Trump and Putin would “certainly discuss the overall international situation and hopefully also arms control and disarmament issues” during their meeting in the Finnish capital.

“Even small steps in reducing tensions would be in everybody’s interest,” Niinisto said in a statement.

The summit is expected to include a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin, a working breakfast, and a joint news conference, Kremlin foreign-policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters.

The Kremlin and the White House are discussing a possible joint statement that Putin and Trump would issue at the summit with a plan for improving bilateral relations, Ushakov said.

The meeting “has huge significance for both Russia and for America,” Ushakov said. “I think it will be the main international event of the summer.”

The summit date falls after previously planned stops during a trip to Europe by Trump for a NATO summit meeting July 11 and 12 in Brussels and a visit to Britain on July 13. It also allows Putin to be in Moscow for the World Cup soccer final on July 15.

Trump’s decision to highlight Putin’s denials of Russian interference drew sharp rebukes from some Democratic lawmakers.

“The President can either believe the unanimous conclusion of our intelligence community, or he can believe Vladimir Putin,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in tweets.

“This is dangerous, this is weak, and it’s yet another slap in the face to the intelligence professionals who quite literally risk their lives to gather this kind of intelligence,” Warner wrote. “Make no mistake: the President just gave Russia the green light to once again interfere in US Elections.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D- N.Y., jumped on Trump’s tweet, saying: “Why do you trust Putin more than your own Republican DOJ officials and the Republican special counsel that was appointed by a Republican?”

Other Democrats voiced skepticism Thursday about how much a Trump- Putin summit would accomplish.

“The President should use any meeting with Putin to confront him on Russia’s interference in our elections and the elections of our allies, the invasion of Ukraine, Russian and Syrian war crimes in Syria, and the chemical weapons attack in the U.K., among many other issues,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “But instead, I fear that this summit will prove to be another blow to NATO and our allies, and a gift to the Kremlin.”

Trump has long sought to cultivate a warm friendship with his Russian counterpart as a means of solving intractable problems around the world, and has said he admires the strength of Putin’s authoritarian rule. Earlier this month, Trump called for Russia to be readmitted to the Group of Seven nations that hold economic summits.

NATO leaders had expressed concerns about a Trump-Putin meeting taking place either before or after their planned summit.

A friendly Trump meeting with Putin ahead of the NATO meeting, they reasoned, could have exposed cracks in the alliance, which is divided over whether the West should further isolate Russia or open more dialogue and business dealings with it.

Finland has been a favored location for U.S.-Russian and Soviet summits since Cold War times.

It was the site of a 1975 meeting between President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and hosted a summit between President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. In 1997, President Bill Clinton met his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, in Helsinki.