 "Trump to meet one-on-one with Putin in Alaska — a repeat of infamous Helsinki summit")
US President Donald Trump will have a one on one meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Alska on Friday, the White House has said.
Beside two leaders, only their interpreters will be present inside the room — just like the Helsinki summit of 2018 between the two leaders that is widely condemned as one of the lowest point of American engagement with Russia.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday said that the summit with Putin would be a “listening exercise” for Trump and “the goal of this meeting for the president is to walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war”.
Leavitt further said, “I think the president of the United States getting in the room with the president of Russia sitting face-to-face, rather than speaking over the telephone, will give this president the best indication of how to end this war and where this is headed.”
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Despite Trump’s saying at a press conference that he would go to Russia to meet Putin, Leavitt said that he would not go to Russia. Notably, Russia is just across the sea from Alaska, with the two countries just three miles apart at the closest point.
Putin likely to walk away with victory without an adult in room
With no one in the room who could advise him or counter Putin’s manipulation, Trump is much more like to find a common ground with the Russian leader to advance his goals than find a middle ground to end the war in Ukraine and pressure him into accepting a ceasefire as a pre-condition for arriving at a peace deal.
This would bring to life the worst fears of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his European partners who are concerned that Trump could cut a unilateral deal favourable to Russia and force it on Ukraine and Europe.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsTo bring Trump firmly into his folds, Putin will probably arrive at the summit with grand plans for the United States and Russia to join hands in profiting from the extraction and trade of Russian natural resources, according to David Blair, the Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator at The Telegraph.
Energy extraction has always resonated with Trump. He, after all, is a champion of ‘drill, baby, drill’ approach.
Blair outlined Putin’s probable approach, “He will present Ukraine as being an irritating obstacle to the appealing goal of the US and Russia burying the"ir differences and prospering together. In Putin’s dream scenario, Mr Trump will then agree to a Kremlin-drafted peace plan, whereupon Russia and America could begin their new era of co-operation by ruthlessly imposing that plan on Ukraine and stuffing it down Mr Zelensky’s throat, perhaps literally.”
The 2018 Helsinki summit that shocked America
Trump held a one on one meeting with Putin with only their interpreters present for over two hours on July 16, 2018 at the Finnish capital Helsinki.
The meeting was held with complete opacity. No agenda was released before the meeting and no communique was issued after the meeting. In the meeting, there were no aides, note-takers, or other officials.
It later emerged that in a previous meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in 2017, Trump had snatched notes from his interpreter and barred them ever talking about the conversation. The snatching of notes means that there is no record anywhere of what the two leaders discussed in the meeting.
After the Helsinki meeting concluded, which lasted for more than two hours against the scheduled time of 90 minutes, Trump parroted Russian propaganda and rejected his own intelligence agencies’ assessments in what shock to even top officials of his foreign policy team.
“President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” said Trump when asked about the Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump’s acquittal of the Russian subversive campaign came just three days after then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for interfering in the 2016 election.
The meeting showed that Trump was completely under Putin’s influence and was up for undermining own government and policy to improve ties with Putin.
The Russian leader also convinced Trump to withdraw US troops from Russia in a major victory for the Russian agenda in Syria and West Asia.
The condemnation of Trump’s capitulation before Putin was such that even Republican lawmakers joined it. Republican Senator John McCain called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory” and said that “no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant”.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said that there was “no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia” as Trump had made. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is today one of the biggest cheerleaders of Trump, called it a “missed opportunity to firmly hold Russia accountable for 2016 meddling”.
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