President Trump is approaching his first bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin with “eyes wide open,” according to a top U.S. diplomat.
“President Trump is pursuing this meeting … to determine if Russia is willing to make progress in America’s bilateral relationship,” U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman told reporters during a briefing Thursday.
“[Trump] believes a better relationship with Russia would be better for America and Russia, but the ball is in Russia’s court,” Huntsman said. He said Trump and his staff are “entering with our eyes wide open, but peace is always worth the effort.”
The July 16 meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, Finland, will follow the same format as the president’s summit last month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He and Putin will meet one-on-one for a brief period before proceeding to oversee an expanded bilateral discussion and working lunch with aides. They are expected to discuss U.S.-Russia relations, Syria, Ukraine’s sovereignty, and Moscow’s malicious cyberoffensive against the U.S. and several other countries.
A senior administration official said Trump intends to hold Russia accountable for election meddling and its “malign activities throughout Europe.” The official did not mention two nerve agent poisonings in the United Kingdom this year that Russia was widely thought to have been behind.
“I think it’s fair to say, since the end of the Cold War, each president has tried a reset or redo of the U.S.-Russia relationship and inevitably left the relationship worse off with deep disappointments,” the official said, adding Trump will make a “sober assessment” of U.S. relations with Russia during his meeting with Putin.
“A dialogue on the true state of the relationship is really what is needed,” the official added.
Trump’s meeting with Putin comes on the heels of a meeting in Moscow earlier this week between a group of Republican lawmakers and Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, during which they discussed the country’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“Election meddling has been brought up by those of us here on the ground in Moscow repeatedly, and certainly by a group of seven senators who were just here,” a senior administration official said Thursday, claiming the topic will soon be “stressed in ways that have never been discussed before.”
