Backdrop of history and hacking allegations as Trump and Putin prepare for Finland summit
The summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin will be held at one of the Finnish President’s official residences in Helsinki.
The meeting will take place tomorrow at a palace that overlooks the Baltic Sea, where the presidents’ predecessors have met, Finnish officials said.
It will take place despite a grand jury announcement on Friday that 12 Russian military intelligence officers hacked into the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic party.
US intelligence agencies have said the meddling was to help the Trump campaign and harm the election bid by Hillary Clinton.
Mr Putin’s foreign affairs adviser reaffirmed Moscow’s insistence that it did not try to influence the election as the US Justice Department was preparing to announce charges against the Russians.
Adviser Yuri Ushakov called the summit “the summer’s main international event”.
He said it offered hope that Moscow and Washington could join efforts to tackle global challenges such as international terrorism and regional conflicts.
“The current tensions have no objective reasons,” Mr Ushakov said.
The office of Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said Mr Trump and Mr Putin would meet at the 19th century Presidential Palace, close to the capital’s famous waterfront Market Square.
The two leaders have met twice before at international meetings but the Helsinki summit will be their first official standalone meeting.
Former US President George H W Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev held talks at the same venue in 1990.
President Trump and first lady Melania Trump are scheduled to start the day with Mr Niinisto and his spouse, Jenni Haukio, at breakfast in Mantyniemi, another presidential residence in Helsinki where the couple live most of the time.
Mr Niinisto will also hold a separate meeting with Mr Putin.
Finland, a nation of 5.5 million, has a long legacy of hosting summits between the US and the Soviet Union or Russia because of its geographic location and perceived neutrality.
The last time a summit brought presidential entourages from Moscow and Washington to Helsinki was in March 1997.
Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin held talks on arms control and Nato expansion.
Gen Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff, met Gen Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, in a manor house owned by the Finnish state in June to exchange views on military relations, Syria and international security.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are to meet at the Presidential Palace tomorrow.
Researcher Sari Autio-Sarasmo, at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute, said the Finnish capital and Vienna – the capital of Austria – were conduits between the East and the West during the Cold War.
Both cities were centres of espionage and intrigue, but Helsinki specialised in relaying information and acting as a go-between for the world’s two superpowers.
“As a member of the European Union, Finland doesn’t anymore emphasise its neutrality, but strong expertise, particularly on Russia, and good location makes Finland a very useful meeting place,” said Mr Autio-Sarasmo, who studies Cold War history.
US President Gerald R Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev met in Helsinki in 1975 to sign the landmark Helsinki Accords, a commitment to peace, security and human rights.
Finland joined the European Union in 1995, but has remained outside of Nato as a non-aligned nation, as Sweden does.
The 3,000-square-metre Presidential Palace, which was renovated in 2015, has hosted prominent guests who are not politicians during its eventful past, including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and Pope John Paul II.
It was built for a Finnish merchant in the early 19th century on grounds that formerly held a salt storehouse.
Finland was integrated into Russia’s tsarist empire as an independent grand duchy in 1809 after being part of the kingdom of Sweden for nearly 700 years.
The building was completed in 1845 at the request of Emperor Nicholas I, the Grand Duke of Finland, and became the imperial palace.
Some rooms were modelled after the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, the official residence of Russia’s Romanov monarchs.
Russian Emperor Alexander II visited the Helsinki palace several times. He was popular with Finns because of his sympathetic policies.
During the First World War, the grand residence temporarily housed a military hospital.
After Finland’s independence from Russia in 1917, it was officially renamed the Presidential Palace in 1921.
The palace now is the working residence of Finland’s president. It houses the Office of the President and is the venue for official events.
In the lead up to the US-Russia summit in Helsinki tomorrow, there is much speculation in Washington, as well as in many Middle Eastern and European capitals, about the prospects of presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin striking a grand bargain that involves a trade-off over Syria and Ukraine. The alleged quid pro quo would have Russia exercise its influence in Syria to rollback Iran’s military footprint in return for the White House scaling back the sanctions placed on Russia for its seizure of Crimea and its destabilisation of eastern Ukraine.
The speculation is partly being fueled by the recent refusal of US National Security Adviser John Bolton, who met President Putin recently, to rule out the possibility of dropping current sanctions.
Furthermore, President Trump himself left the door to recognising Russia’s annexation of Crimea open, telling reporters that “we’re going to have to see,” that Russia has “spent a lot of money rebuilding it,” and that he and Mr Putin will indeed be talking about Ukraine and Syria.
The purported deal reportedly has the support of America’s closest Middle Eastern allies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Moscow three times this year, including this week, to secure guarantees against further Iranian entrenchment in Syria. He, and some of America’s Arab Gulf allies, are said to have promised their Russian counterparts to use their good offices with Washington to push for a US-Russian rapprochement along similar lines.
Yet, despite all the above, a more sober examination of the political and military constraints indicates that such a bargain, if at all on the table, is unlikely to succeed. For one, any understanding premised on a trade-off between Ukraine and Syria will run into stiff resistance in the US Congress and will be almost impossible for President Trump to deliver on. US sanctions against Russia for its activities in Ukraine and Crimea were originally enacted as executive orders by former President Barack Obama following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, but were swiftly legislated into law by Congress and are nearly impossible for the president to reverse.
Fears that President Trump would try to overturn or delay sanctions led to additional legislation making the implementation of the Russia sanctions compulsory. While the law does allow the president to issue some individual waivers on national security grounds, these would still have to be reviewed by the relevant congressional committees.
President Trump would also have to contend with the anticipated uproar from European allies, let alone stiff domestic opposition, who consider any legitimisation of Russia’s military actions in Ukraine as undermining Europe’s security framework and the post-World War II order on which it relies.
The Europeans may have little pull with the Trump administration, but at a time when the president has locked horns with them over trade, financial and military contributions to Nato, and a host of multilateral treaties, such a brazen move could push cross-Atlantic relations into the realm of the unknown, triggering alarm bells even within his own administration.
A much more politically plausible understanding that could emerge from Helsinki is one that is limited to US-Russian trade-offs in Syria where, contrary to conventional wisdom, Washington retains significant cards to play. Although Syrian regime forces, backed by the Russian air force and Iranian proxies, are scoring significant victories in various parts of the country, the US and its local allies still hold territory east of the Euphrates river equivalent to about twenty per cent of the country. These include the majority of Syria’s oil fields, large swaths of farmland considered to be the country’s breadbasket, and the strategically important Euphrates dam.
President Putin appears eager to cap what has so far been a remarkably successful military intervention in Syria by securing a political settlement that legitimises and reflects his achievements, but he has yet to succeed in doing so. He has repeatedly announced “mission accomplished” and troop drawdowns from Syria only to have conditions on the ground, and the ambitions of his partners, entangle him in yet another military campaign. Without the US and the Syrian assets currently under its control he will be hard-pressed to insure the political and financial sustainability of any allied regime in Damascus.
The challenge for what may otherwise be a short-term confluence of US-Russian interests over Syria lies in the powerful realities on the ground, which will make such a deal difficult to implement. Just as many underestimate the current US leverage in Syria, they also tend to exaggerate Russian power, particularly when it comes to delivering on its end of the bargain, of reigning in Iran. President Putin can order his air force to stand down as Israeli jets regularly pound Iranian positions in Syria, but he has neither the troops nor the inclination to take on tens of thousands of Iranian-backed proxies fighting alongside regime forces.
How, if at all, Russia can compel Iran to scale back its growing grip over Syria, one for which it paid dearly in blood and treasure, is unclear. Mr Netanyahu may now be realising this first hand as Iranian proxies continue their push towards Israel’ borders despite reported Russian assurances to the contrary.
These hard-hitting geopolitical realities notwithstanding, President Trump, ever a showman who craves the spotlight and big deals, may still defy conventional wisdom by announcing that a grand bargain with President Putin over Syria has in fact been reached. If so, the specific elements of such a deal, let alone the prospects of carrying them through, may leave most observers as puzzled about Helsinki as they were about the recent USNorth Korea summit.
How Russia can compel Iran to scale back its grip over Syria, one for which it paid dearly in blood and treasure, is unclear
Firas Maksad is the Director of Arabia Foundation, a Washington think tank. He is also adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School for International Affairs