If President Trump meets with Vladimir Putin next month, the sit-down could take place in Helsinki, Finland right after the NATO summit in Brussels and Trump's quick trip to the U.K.
The location would offer Putin his desired neutral ground in a country close enough to Russia that he could return to Moscow in time for the final World Cup match on July 15.
While nothing final about a potential summit has been put in writing, “everyone’s preparing as if it’s Helsinki,” said a person familiar with the planning.
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Trump is scheduled to be in Brussels July 11-12 for a meeting of the NATO military alliance, before traveling to the U.K. for events on July 13.
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto’s country — officially neutral during the Cold War and not a NATO member — shares a border with Russia, and the president has nurtured a relationship with Putin. Like Trump, who defied the “do not congratulate” directions of his advisers to publicly applaud Putin on his reelection, Niinisto also went out of his way to congratulate him on his victory.
Politico notes Finland holds historical significance for past U.S.-Soviet relations.
President Gerald Ford traveled to the Finnish capital in 1975 to sign the Helsinki Accords in a bid to improve relations with the Soviet Union. And President George H.W. Bush met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Helsinki in 1990. The Trump administration was also considering Vienna for the summit, but recently the talk has shifted to Helsinki, the source familiar with the planning said.
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Trump has been set on meeting with Putin since his Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, brushing away concern about the optics of a meeting while the special counsel's office continues its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“There’s no stopping him,” a senior administration official told The New Yorker. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”
NATO allies are nervous about what could come from a Trump-Putin summit and how it might impact the alliance.
A warm and effusive Trump meeting with Putin could expose cracks in the alliance, which is divided over whether the West should further isolate Russia or open more dialogue and business dealings with it. As a result, some European governments are actively pressing the White House to hold the Putin meeting after the NATO summit.
But worries are so high that one senior European diplomat, in a recent conversation, halted mid-sentence to muse about whether it was worse for the two to meet before the NATO summit — when many alliance leaders fear the U.S. president might make big concessions to Putin without input from them — or after, when they would be unable to mop up a mess.
Both options are bad, concluded the diplomat ...
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NATO leaders from Britain, France and Germany who attended the Group of Seven meeting in Canada this month remain angry and traumatized by what they saw as Trump’s insulting behavior. He came late, left early and refused to sign the final communique.
“The G-7 was an epic disaster — the diplomatic equivalent of a multiple-car pileup,” said Jeremy Shapiro, director of studies at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says Trump simply meeting with Putin is not a problem. Diplomats worry the U.S. president will make promises or decisions in the moment that impact global efforts to hold Russia accountable for ongoing aggressions.
“To meet President Putin is not in any way contradicting NATO policies, because NATO is in favor of dialogue with Russia,” Stoltenberg said last week in London. “We don’t want a new Cold War. We don’t want a new arms race. We don’t want to isolate Russia. . . . Even if we don’t believe we are able to get a better relationship with Russia in the foreseeable future, we need to talk to them, to manage a difficult relationship, to avoid incidents and accidents.”
The concern is not the fact of Trump meeting with Putin, several diplomats said, but what he might say or agree to and how it would affect their desire for a unified summit outcome.
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Major NATO players, including Germany and France, insist there will be no compromise on Crimea or NATO’s new eastern deployments. “There will be no deviation from the notion that the seizure of Crimea really contradicted international law,” the senior NATO official said. There is no predicting “what the president continues to insist on in his tweets,” the official said, “but I think in this case, NATO leaders will be clear.”
White House eyes Helsinki for Trump-Putin sitdown (Politico)
After ‘diplomatic equivalent of a multiple-car pileup,’ U.S. allies brace for NATO summit (Washington Post)