Summit: What’s in it for Putin?
Trump claims low expectations; Russian leader may be seeking US approval on Syria, Crimea
HELSINKI >> He allegedly helped him get elected. He has charmed him and egged him on. And today, 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 the one-on-one summit, Trump faces intense pressure back home to confront Putin over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. In Washington and throughout the West, leaders also are 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. 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 landed in Helsinki on Sunday night with what he said were low expectations and an unusually loose agenda for the kind of highstakes international meeting that typically is tightly scripted with predetermined outcomes.
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. “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 12 Russian agents — who were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on Friday for hacking and releasing Democratic emails — when prompted in an interview with CBS News anchor Jeff Glor.
In Washington, Democratic leaders called on Trump to cancel the summit over the indictments. While there is precedent — President Barack Obama nixed a meeting with Putin in 2013 in part because Russia had granted asylum
to Edward Snowden, who stands accused of illegally leaking U.S. intelligence secrets — Trump decided to keep the meeting.
U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russia is likely to try to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, and 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, RNeb., said in a statement.
Putin is likely today 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 detente without concessions,” Alexander Baunov, a foreign policy specialist at the independent Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, wrote
recently. “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 the 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” such as 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.”
European leaders, shellshocked from Trump’s ambush over defense spending at last week’s NATO meeting, said they fear Trump will legitimize Russia’s claim on Crimea. That would mean ending sanctions against Russia, blowing up the security response and giving a green light to the redrawing of international borders by force.
“If (European leaders) feel that Trump has dissed them in Brussels and yet embraces Putin and is uncritical of Putin on Monday in Helsinki, that’s very bad optics,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former ambassador to NATO and senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
At a dinner of NATO leaders last week in Brussels, Trump told world leaders that he would talk with Putin
about Russia’s involvement in Syria and Ukraine, but he went into little detail, according to one official with knowledge of the conversation.
Among Trump’s statements that clashed the most with the way America’s main European allies see the world were those on immigration. Standing alongside British Prime Minister Theresa May last week, Trump used similar language to the white nationalist movement to denounce immigration as permanently altering cultures throughout Europe.
“I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture,” Trump said. “It’s a very sad situation.”
May disagreed, but Trump would find kinship with Putin. The Russian president has described Europe’s immigration policy as “diluting traditional national values.”
And Russian state media, like some conservative news outlets in the United States, have been aggressively highlighting security problems and cultural clashes arising from the migration of refugees to Western Europe from Syria and other wartorn places.
Syria will be another top agenda item, officials on both sides have said. Putin has met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with a top Iranian official in recent days, stoking speculation that Putin and Trump could reach an agreement over the role that Iran, an ally of Russia, plays in Syria’s civil war.
Trump and Putin will first meet one on one and then be joined by their top advisers for a working lunch. They will conclude their visit with a joint news conference — the first such joint news event between an American and Russian president since 2010.