President Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin will reportedly meet privately, without the company of aides, at the onset of their July 16 summit in Helsinki, Finland.
Both presidents have previously spoken in-person, but the Finland meeting will be the first without interpreters or top diplomats in attendance, CNN reports.
The meeting is the first formal summit between the U.S. and Russia since Trump took office a year and a half ago. Because other officials will not be in the room for the one-on-one, there will not be a formal record of what they discuss.
Aides are expected to join Trump and Putin later to discuss Russia’s interference in U.S. elections, relations with war-torn Syria, and nuclear weapons.
“The goal of this meeting really is for the two leaders to have a chance to sit down, not in the context of some larger multilateral meeting, but just the two of them, to go over what is on their mind about a whole range of issues,” national security adviser John Bolton told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, joined only by translators, prior to a meeting with their respective delegations last month in Singapore.
Trump and Putin previously met at the G-20 summit last year. They were joined by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, as well as an interpreter from each government.
