‘Someday, maybe he’ll be a friend’
Trump highlights common ground before Putin summit
HELSINKI — He allegedly helped him get elected. He has charmed him and egged him on. And on Monday, when Russian President Vladimir Putin meets President Donald Trump face to face here in Finland’s capital, he will see what he gets out of it.
Coming into Monday’s one-on-one summit, Trump faces intense pressure back home to confront Putin over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, especially in the wake of Friday’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking and releasing Democratic emails.
In Washington and throughout the West, leaders are also pressing Trump to hold firm in countering Putin’s intervention in Syria and Ukraine by refusing to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
But Trump’s weeklong tour through Europe only served to underscore his common ground with Putin more than their differences. In Belgium and in the United Kingdom, Trump echoed Putin’s ideological worldview and his political posture — from decrying immigration patterns that he said were destroying European culture to assaulting the media as “fake news” and blaming the
U.S. “deep state” and a “rigged witch hunt” investigation for the poor condition of U.S.-Russian relations.
And Trump’s recent moves to disrupt America’s traditional alliances, both with trade disputes and rhetorical broadsides, enhances Russia’s position as Putin seeks to expand Moscow’s influence around the world.
Trump was headed to Helsinki with what he said were low expectations and an unusually loose agenda for the kind of high-stakes international meeting that typically is tightly scripted with predetermined outcomes.
But Trump has an uncommon faith in his abilities to wing it on the global stage. In a trio of tweets sent Sunday from aboard Air Force One, he complained that the news media would not give him due credit for the summit.
“Unfortunately, no matter how well I do at the Summit, if I was given the great city of Moscow as retribution for all of the sins and evils committed by Russia over the years, I would return to criticism that it wasn’t good enough — that I should have gotten Saint Petersburg in addition!” Trump tweeted. “Much of our news media is indeed the enemy of the people.”
When he departed Washington last week, Trump said meeting with Putin may be “the easiest” part of his trip. And as in last month’s Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he is banking on his personality to forge a lasting bond with Putin that could improve U.S.-Russia relations and solve some of the world’s intractable problems.
“He’s been very nice to me the times I’ve met him,” Trump told reporters last week in Brussels, previewing his Putin tête-à-tête. “I’ve been nice to him. He’s a competitor … He’s not my enemy. And hopefully, someday, maybe he’ll be a friend. It could happen.”
In an indication of his friendly posture, Trump said he “hadn’t thought” of asking Putin to extradite the 12 Russian agents indicted by the U.S. Justice Department when prompted in an interview with CBS News anchor Jeff Glor.
Trump went on to blame his predecessor for Russia’s election interference, telling Glor, “They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration,” and adding that the Democratic National Committee “should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked.”
For the Kremlin, blaming former President Barack Obama and the Washington establishment for the world’s ills has been one way to continue winning over Trump.
Ever since Trump’s surprise election victory, Putin has been echoing Trump’s claim that investigations into Russian election interference are sinister efforts to delegitimize and sabotage his presidency by Washington’s Democratic establishment and the “deep state,” a reference to the intelligence and national security apparatus. Both Trump and Putin have said the investigations are undermining U.S.-Russia relations and preventing progress on Syria and other problems.
“We are well aware of the extent to which the American establishment is being held hostage to stereotypes and is under the heaviest domestic antiRussian pressure,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week, according to Tass, a Russian state-controlled news agency.
In Washington, Democratic leaders called on Trump to cancel the summit over last Friday’s indictments. While there is precedent — Obama nixed a Moscow meeting with Putin in 2013 in part because Russia granted asylum to Edward Snowden, who stands accused of illegally leaking U.S. intelligence secrets — Trump decided to keep the meeting.
Trump has pledged to ask Putin whether Russia interfered in the election, though he said he assumes he will again deny it.
U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russia is likely to try to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, and both Democrats and Republicans have implored Trump to sternly warn him against doing so.
“All patriotic Americans should understand that Putin is not America’s friend, and he is not the president’s buddy,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said in a statement.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., who recently returned from a visit to Moscow, warned that “the Russians are very prepared to argue on so many issues that they’re not in the wrong.”
On Monday, Putin is likely to try to win concessions by playing to Trump’s eagerness to one-up Obama and reject establishment thinking.
“Trump is the ideal partner for a détente without concessions,” Alexander Baunov, a foreign-policy specialist at the independent Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, recently wrote. “He’s an enemy of the same America that is Russia’s adversary.”
One Russian objective, for instance, has been to win a more accommodating approach from Trump on Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which included the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Putin claims that the Obama administration fomented the pro-Western revolution in Kiev that year in a bid to weaken Russian influence, and that Russia needed to take over Crimea to protect Russian speakers on the Black Sea peninsula.
A top Putin ally in Russian parliament, Andrei Klimov, described Trump as a pragmatist with whom Moscow can work productively, in contrast to the “academic idealist” Obama who focused on “irrational matters” like promoting liberalism and democracy in places like Ukraine.
“Trump is a different story,” Klimov said. “Ukraine was a project of Mr. Obama. The project didn’t pan out.”
Trump has kept his options open regarding Crimea. Asked last week whether he intends to recognize Crimea as part of Russia when he meets with Putin, Trump blamed the situation on his predecessor.
“That was on Barack Obama’s watch,” he told reporters. “That was not on Trump’s watch. Would I have allowed it to happen? No.” Trump added, “What will happen with Crimea from this point on? That I can’t tell you.”