A spokesman for Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he hopes the Russian president’s upcoming meeting with his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump creates a “working dialogue” for the two leaders at a time when U.S.-Russia relations are said to have reached an “all-time low.”
“The expectation is that a working dialogue will be established, which is vitally important for the entire world when it comes to increasing the efficiency of resolving a critical mass of conflicts,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“This is the first meeting, the first time the two presidents will get acquainted – this is the main thing about it,” Peskov said.
A senior White House official said Trump is going into the meeting “with [his] eyes wide open but with expectations tempered due to recent developments.”
“There are certain areas in which potential cooperation seems not totally out of the question but that depends very much on how Moscow responds,” the official told The Post, citing the Syrian conflict and North Korea’s ballistic missile program as examples.
Russia has joined with China to call for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to freeze his nuclear weapons program, but they also asked the U.S. to postpone its military exercises with South Korea and not deploy an anti-missile system intended to protect Seoul in the event of an attack.
Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with Putin will take place Friday at the G-20 summit in Hamburg. It will be the first bilateral meeting between U.S. and Russian presidents since Barack Obama met with Putin at the United Nations in September 2015.
Obama and Putin also had an informal meeting on the sidelines of last year’s G-20 summit in China.
Peskov said Putin is expected to discuss global terrorism and the six-year civil war in Syria, but said the brief format of the meeting may not allow him to explain fully the reasons behind Moscow’s incursion in Ukraine.
The White House has declined to say whether Trump will confront Putin about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election during his sit-down with the Kremlin leader.