President Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, under pressure to confront his Russian counterpart over Kremlin meddling in the 2016 election and with concerns rising about the U.S., under Trump’s direction, abandoning current international order.
The highly-anticipated event will include 90 minutes in which the former property developer and the former KGB agent meet one-to-one, with only their respective translators in attendance.
A U.S. grand jury indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers on Friday for their alleged role in a scheme to hack email accounts controlled by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and to publicize the messages. Trump said in an interview with CBS News broadcast on Sunday that he may ask the Russian president to extradite the agents to the U.S.
The indictments raised the stakes for the Helsinki summit, even as the Trump administration looked to ratchet down expectations. Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, said the Trump-Putin event was a meeting, not a summit, and National Security Adviser John Bolton said the U.S. expects no “concrete deliverables” to result.
Confrontation Urged
The president has expressed reluctance to hold Putin to account for Moscow’s interference in the election and has indicated he accepts the Russian president’s denials at face value. But U.S. lawmakers of both parties said following Friday’s indictments that Trump must either confront Putin in Helsinki or cancel the meeting in protest.
Departing for Helsinki on Sunday from a weekend at his golf resort in Scotland, the president bristled about how his performance with Putin may be judged.
“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 said on Twitter.
Trump also deflected responsibility for confronting Moscow over election interference, saying in tweets and interviews that former President Barack Obama had done nothing to prevent the hacks of Democratic email accounts or to punish the Russians afterward.
Trump said in the CBS interview that he “hadn’t thought about” asking Putin to extradite the indicted agents. “But I certainly, I’ll be asking about it. But again, this was during the Obama administration,” he said.
Spoiling the Mood
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday that the indictments were baseless and had been timed to poison the mood ahead of the summit. In June, Putin reiterated his denials of Kremlin involvement in the election meddling but allowed that non-state actors in Russia -- people he likened to “artists” -- may have taken it upon themselves to launch cyberattacks on Clinton’s campaign and the DNC.
Read more: Putin Praises Trump and Suggests Russian Hand in Hacking
The drama between Trump and Putin will play out at the imposing 19th Century presidential palace in Helsinki from about 6:00 a.m. New York time.
Going it Alone
Several Senate Democrats wrote to Trump to warn him against meeting alone with Putin, to no avail. “I really would feel much better if there were other Americans in the room,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday.
Officials at the Kremlin and the White House say Putin and Trump will discuss many of the issues causing the most friction between the countries. That includes Russia’s military incursions into Ukraine and Syria, the Iranian presence in Syria, Russian hostility toward U.S. allies, and renewing international arms control treaties.
“I hope it’s a detailed conversation about where we might be able to find some overlapping and shared interests,” Huntsman said Sunday. “This is an attempt to see if we can defuse and take some of the drama, and quite frankly some of the danger, out of the relationship.”
Press Conference
But the indictments risk overshadowing the talks. U.S. reporters at a joint press conference after the meeting are sure to pepper the pair with questions about the Kremlin’s election interference, and whether and how Trump addressed the issue with Putin.
A grand jury found that Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, known as GRU, stole emails from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, then released them in ways meant to dominate headlines ahead of the election. In a second operation, the agents targeted U.S. election infrastructure and some local election officials.
The grand jury didn’t find that any American knowingly cooperated with Moscow’s operations. But Friday’s indictments noted that the GRU agents first attacked Clinton’s personal email server on or around the day Trump famously implored Russia to find his opponent’s missing emails:
30,000 Emails
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” then-candidate Trump said at a July 27, 2016, news conference.
Russia is prepared to discuss the U.S. allegations of election but “never interfered and will never interfere” in American political affairs, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said on Friday, before the indictments were announced.
“The Cold War is long over,” Ushakov told reporters in Moscow. “Russia and the U.S. are facing new and similar threats.”
Trump’s attitude toward Putin will be contrasted with his actions last week at a NATO summit in Brussels and a visit to the U.K., where he castigated U.S. allies for not more rapidly increasing their defense spending and involved himself in the internal affairs of British Prime Minister Theresa May and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. On Sunday, the president offered congratulations to Putin for putting on “a truly great” World Cup soccer tournament.
European Foes
Trump also made waves when he was asked by CBS in the interview broadcast Sunday to name the U.S.’s “biggest foe globally,” and put the European Union at the top of the list. “You wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe,” he said. Russia was listed as a “foe in certain respects.”
Trump continues to face questions about whether he’s playing into the hands of Putin, who has long sought to exacerbate and exploit tensions among Western allies.
One possible outcome of the summit is work toward a new nuclear weapons agreement. The New START treaty negotiated under Obama expires in 2021, and both sides would like to extend and possibly expand the accord. The two leaders are also likely to discuss a dispute over compliance with a 1987 treaty that bans the deployment of intermediate-range missiles on land.
Putin, meanwhile, is stepping up efforts to broker a deal for pro-Iranian militias in Syria to withdraw from areas near the border with Israel in favor of government troops. The move could be a way to ease tensions with the U.S. as well as shore up Putin’s ally, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Property Seizures
“I am confident that President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin will put America in a better place,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who’ll join Trump in Helsinki, told reporters on Friday. “It’s very important they meet.”
Russia has its own complaints to take to Trump. Putin intends to discuss the U.S. seizure of Russian diplomatic properties in the U.S. as punishment for the 2016 election meddling, as well as the arrests of Russian citizens in third countries at Washington’s request.
Since 2008 there have been 42 such arrests, according to the Kremlin, including 11 last year. In addition, 248 Russian nationals and 442 of the country’s companies are under U.S. sanctions, the Kremlin says.
--With assistance from Toluse Olorunnipa and Henry Meyer.
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