Jon Huntsman, the USA ambassador to Russian Federation, tried rebranding the event in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday from Norway’s capital.
Advertisement
Helsingin Sanomat, one of the country’s top news outlets, unveiled almost 300 billboards calling out the leaders’ respective records of rocky relations with the media.
Trump told CBS Evening News anchor Jeff Glor that he had low expectations for the summit.
With Washington and Moscow at loggerheads over Ukraine, Iran and trade tariffs as well as Syria, even Trump has cautioned that he is not approaching the Putin summit “with high expectations”. He would regard the summit as a success if there was an agreement to merely reopen severed lines of communications across the board, he said.
Putin spoke of the importance of the two countries working together and praised Trump, at one point interrupting the news conference to give the US president a soccer ball.
For Russia, it is also a powerful sign that Western efforts to isolate Moscow have failed.
Russia’s state-run Channel One said Trump’s meetings in Britain and contentious appearance at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit last week were secondary to Monday’s summit, saying: “After all, he was just passing through Brussels and London on the way to Helsinki”.
Many fear that Trump – in his eagerness to prove that he was right to seek the summit with Putin despite United States political opposition – may give up too much ground.
President Trump has nevertheless faced large criticism ahead of the meeting after branding the European Union a “foe”. “Nobody there really believes that any good can come out of this summit”.
Putin suggested USA investigators might travel to Russia to participate in questioning Russians accused by Washington of US election meddling as long as Russian investigators were allowed to do the same with US spies operating in Russia, an idea Trump’s critics dismissed as ludicrous. He has repeatedly noted that Putin denies it, while also saying that it is alleged to have taken place before he became president.
In a weekend interview with CBS News, Trump admitted that Russian Federation remains a foe, but he put Moscow on a par with China and the European Union as economic and diplomatic rivals.
Later in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Putin said “we don’t have anything on [Trump]”. “I have president Putin, he just said it’s not Russian Federation”.
John Huntsman, US Ambassador to Russian Federation, added the meetings were beneficial for both nations due their current fractious bilateral relationship.
The European Union and the United States are best friends, and saying the two are foes was “fake news”, European Council President Donald Tusk said on Sunday, after U.S. President Donald Trump had called the EU a foe on trade matters.
As U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, many Americans are wondering if the Kremlin is trying to derail November’s U.S. midterm elections.
Trump and Putin held a private, one-on-one meeting that lasted two hours, CBS News reported. “He can’t simply raise it, accept Putin’s denial and then let him off the hook”, Schumer said in a statement. -Soviet and U.S. -Russian summits because of its geographic location and perceived neutrality.
The president flew in from Scotland, where he and his wife, Melania, spent the weekend at a golf resort he owns there.
The Russian foreign ministry “liked” his tweet.
And at this point, US sanctions against Russian Federation over the annexation still remain in place, many of them dating back to the Obama administration in 2014.
Advertisement
Ambassador Jon Huntsman says the two countries now have a “fraught bilateral relationship”.
