When U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday for high-stakes talks, Trump might be coming face-to-face with a shrewd chief who has dealt together with his fair proportion of U.S. presidents.
In Anchorage, the 2 presidents are set to debate the way forward for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—which started almost three and a half years in the past—with out Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the negotiating desk. However within the days forward of the talks, Trump has downplayed expectations for any breakthrough, telling reporters final Friday that he deliberate to “see what [Putin] has in thoughts.”
When U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday for high-stakes talks, Trump might be coming face-to-face with a shrewd chief who has dealt together with his fair proportion of U.S. presidents.
In Anchorage, the 2 presidents are set to debate the way forward for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—which started almost three and a half years in the past—with out Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the negotiating desk. However within the days forward of the talks, Trump has downplayed expectations for any breakthrough, telling reporters final Friday that he deliberate to “see what [Putin] has in thoughts.”
“The president is agreeing to this assembly on the request of President Putin,” White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned on Tuesday. “And the aim of this assembly for the president is to stroll away with a greater understanding of how we are able to finish this conflict.”
It received’t be the primary time that Trump and Putin are assembly in particular person, and Trump is much from the primary American chief to carry talks with the Russian strongman. After greater than 25 years in energy, Putin has met with a number of U.S. presidents amid fraught geopolitical circumstances—experiences that specialists say have formed him right into a seasoned and sharp negotiator.
Putin is a “very intelligent” negotiator, mentioned Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland who’s at present on the Atlantic Council. “He’s glorious at bullshit.”
“The Russians will pitch their stage of bullshit primarily based on their evaluation of their interlocutor’s stage of ignorance,” Fried added.
Friday’s summit would be the two leaders’ first face-to-face assembly since Trump returned to the Oval Office, however they’re no strangers. Trump and Putin met six times throughout the U.S. chief’s first time period in workplace. In some of the memorable instances, the 2 leaders met privately for almost two hours in Helsinki in 2018. In a information convention afterward, Trump—whereas standing next to Putin—appeared to simply accept the Russian chief’s denial that his nation had interfered within the 2016 U.S. presidential election, publicly contradicting U.S. intelligence findings.
“I’ve nice confidence in my intelligence folks, however I’ll inform you that President Putin was extraordinarily sturdy and highly effective in his denial at the moment,” Trump said. “He simply mentioned it’s not Russia. I’ll say this: I don’t see any purpose why it might be.”
On the time, Trump’s remarks drew sharp rebukes from high Republicans, who expressed shock and anger on the president’s statements. One of the crucial vocal critics was the late Sen. John McCain, who lambasted it as “some of the disgraceful performances by an American president in reminiscence” in a press release.
“The injury inflicted by President Trump’s naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is troublesome to calculate,” McCain said. “However it’s clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.”
In distinction, former President Joe Biden met with Putin in particular person solely as soon as throughout his presidency. The 2 leaders met in Geneva in June 2021 for a high-level summit the place the agenda was dominated by problems with arms control and cybersecurity. The subsequent yr, the Kremlin would launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In his eight years in workplace, former U.S. President Barack Obama met with Putin 9 occasions. He additionally met 12 occasions with Dmitry Medvedev—a member of Putin’s get together who was briefly made the Russian president between 2008 and 2012 in a transfer that allowed Putin to bypass constitutional time period limits and once more take workplace in 2012.
Below Obama’s tenure, U.S.-Russia relations had been strained by the Kremlin’s accusations that the State Division was instigating protests in opposition to Putin in addition to Russia’s choice to grant temporary asylum to American whistleblower Edward Snowden. Tensions deepened in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea, and in 2015, when the Kremlin militarily intervened in Syria to again the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama compared Putin to the highly effective Chicago ward bosses that he confronted earlier in his profession—“besides with nukes and a U.N. Safety Council veto.”
“Putin did, in reality, remind me of the types of males who had as soon as run the Chicago machine or Tammany Corridor [a historical New York City political organization]—powerful, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who by no means moved outdoors their slim experiences, and who considered patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as reputable instruments of the commerce,” Obama wrote.
Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, met with Putin a whopping 28 occasions throughout his eight years in workplace. Bush appeared taken together with his Russian counterpart’s character, famously declaring that he acquired “a way of his soul” after their first assembly in 2001.
“I seemed the person within the eye. I discovered him to be very simple and reliable,” Bush mentioned at a press conference. “We had an excellent dialogue. I used to be in a position to get a way of his soul; a person deeply dedicated to his nation and the very best pursuits of his nation.”
After the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, Putin was reportedly the primary world chief to telephone Bush to precise his condolences. In 2002, the 2 leaders inked a nuclear arms pact, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty.
Putin’s first-ever assembly with a U.S. chief was with President Invoice Clinton, who traveled to Moscow for talks in June 2000. In a press convention afterward, Clinton mentioned that the 2 leaders shared common interests similar to nonproliferation and arms management however clashed over Moscow’s actions in Chechnya. Each leaders reached an settlement to every destroy 34 tons of military-grade plutonium and set up a joint information change middle, Clinton mentioned.
The 2 leaders met as presidents a complete of 4 occasions.
In 2023, Clinton mentioned that he realized greater than a decade in the past that Russia deliberate to in the end take army motion in Ukraine.
“Vladimir Putin instructed me in 2011—three years earlier than he took Crimea—that he didn’t agree with the settlement I made with [former Russian President] Boris Yeltsin,” Clinton mentioned, referring to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which noticed Russia vow to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity whereas Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal.
“He mentioned … ‘I don’t agree with it. And I don’t assist it. And I’m not sure by it.’ And I knew from that day ahead it was only a matter of time,” Clinton mentioned.
