Trump's refusal to meet with Putin hit the Kremlin's pride

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at the G20 summit. Photo: Kremlin Administration

The White House on Friday tried to end the rumors that US President Donald Trump could meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Vietnam. To the Kremlin, apparently, this was a complete surprise: only on the eve of Putin’s assistant Yury Ushakov and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke of the upcoming meeting as a fait accompli.

According to "Voice of America"Both leaders are at the summit and may have time to talk for a while, but there will be no substantive talks, said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabi Sanders.

“As for the meeting with Putin, it was never confirmed, and it will not be due to the busy schedules of both parties,” spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters shortly before the presidential plane landed in the Vietnamese city of Danang. “No official meeting is planned for them.”

At the same time, the statement leaves open the possibility that the two leaders will hold an informal conversation while they are in Da Nang.

“They will be in one place. Can it happen that they happen to meet and say hello? Of course, this is possible and quite likely, says Sanders in a statement. “But as for the official scheduled meeting, it’s not in the calendar and we don’t expect it to take place.”

The Russian news agency RIA Novosti on Friday published a material with the opposite message, assuming that there will be negotiations after all: “The reconciliation of the meeting between Putin and Trump continues, reported Peskov.”

Earlier, the Russian side advocated with conflicting statements about the likelihood of meeting. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov told Russian news agencies that the two leaders would hold talks, but Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said only that a possible meeting was being discussed.

Peskov continued to say that the Kremlin did not lose hope even after the public announcement of the White House.

“There are conflicting statements. We don't quite understand yet. But we patiently continue to work in order to reach some kind of understanding. Both presidents are in town. One way or another they will intersect,” Putin’s press secretary said, answering questions from journalists.

On the way to Danang on Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he had seen Russian media reports, but nothing was agreed. According to him, the United States wants to make progress on certain issues, and it is pointless to conduct negotiations if they do not help to achieve this.

A day earlier, Tillerson admitted that Moscow and Washington were working behind the scenes on “some difficult issues,” but he doubted whether the time was right for the second official meeting of Trump and Putin.

First Took place on the margins of the G20 Summit in Germany in July.

Several experts on US-Russian relations are skeptical about the idea of ​​direct negotiations between Putin and Trump at such a difficult stage of relations.

The invited research fellow at the Hudson Institute, Andrei Piontokovsky, believes that Putin would have won the meeting much more than Trump.

“It would be better if the United States and Russia had good relations, but the fact is that Putin is challenging the United States all over the world, including on their own territory, and Trump does not seem to think that this “Hostility towards Western values, democracy and human rights,” said Piontokovsky.

Deputy Director of the Foreign Policy Program of the School of Advanced International Studies. John Hopkins Charles Stevenson called the Trump-Putin meeting "risky" for US interests.

“Meetings at the presidential level can help eliminate misunderstandings and allow for the exchange of views not out of the public eye, and even without the knowledge of subordinates,” Stevenson notes. “But they can also be extremely risky if not coordinated in advance in order to arrive at some kind of agreed communique.” I strongly doubt that President Trump has enough experience and knowledge to reach any substantive agreements with President Putin. ”

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