Hamburg is today to play host to one of the strangest encounters in modern history, when US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet on the margins of the G20 summit.
It is to be their first meeting as presidents, but less clear — and reflecting the unusual circumstances surrounding the event and their relationship — is whether it will be their first meeting at all.
Over the past few years, Trump has variously claimed to have either met Putin and “got along great,” or to have never met him.
Illustration: Mountain people
The power dynamics between the two leaders will be analyzed around the world: One of them is widely believed to have helped engineer the election of the other, who is reportedly under investigation at home for colluding in that venture.
Trump’s words and body language will be subject to immense scrutiny for signs of Putin’s leverage. The Russian leader is also expected to push for Moscow’s take on international relations — that of the interests of leading powers taking precedence over the existing order.
For a man given to outbursts of temper and personal attacks, Trump has always treated Putin with delicacy, and his admiration for his Russian counterpart has never been in question.
Putin has been far more cautious. He has called Trump “colorful,” which the American took for a compliment, although the Russian word used was double-edged, with positive and negative connotations.
“You can rest assured that the Kremlin has prepared well in advance for this meeting, both with a complete analysis and dossier of Mr Trump himself as well as the goals that the Kremlin’s wishes to advance,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Putin goes into the meeting with other advantages. His control of foreign and national security policy is untrammelled, while Trump is hemmed in.
Attempts to relax sanctions on Russia as a sweetener to rejuvenate the Washington-Moscow relationship have been blocked while the US Congress is in the process of not just intensifying the sanctions, but wresting the power to lift them away from the White House.
US National Security Council staff have also pushed back on demands for “deliverables” to use as bargaining chips with which Trump might strike a face-to-face deal of the kind he prided himself on in his real-estate and reality TV years.
Trump wants the meeting with Putin to be a formal affair, but his own advisers have resisted giving the Russian leader one of his principal goals — normalcy and acceptance following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine.
Amid all that uncertainty, Trump’s national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, last week told journalists that the meeting would be unstructured and free-ranging.
“There’s no specific agenda. It’s really going to be whatever the [US] president wants to talk about,” McMaster said, adding that the talks would not “be different from our discussions with any other country, really.”
However, the Kremlin does have an agenda and despite remarks from a spokesman that the Russians would “try to fit” a Trump meeting into Putin’s very tight schedule, it sees the meeting as critical for redrawing the bilateral relationship.
“I was very surprised by General McMaster’s comments, both by what appears to be a lack of US policy preparation for this critical meeting and his comment that the US-Russian relationship is not different from that with any other country,” Conley said.
Maxim Suchkov, a member of the Moscow-based Russian International Affairs Council, said foreign policy experts had been invited by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affaris as early as March to “brainstorm” ideas about what Moscow should be offering and asking for.
Suchkov said that Russian diplomats were thinking about the relationship in “four big baskets,” including regional issues, such as Ukraine and Syria, establishing military channels of communication, and economic relations.
The biggest and vaguest of the four involved the contours of the international order and in particular “what world would the US and Russia want to live in peacefully.”
Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov set out in a speech on Friday last week what such a new order would look like: In place of the West seeking to impose “pseudo-liberal values” across the globe, there would be a balancing of the national interests of major powers, he said.
In an echo of one of Trump’s campaign points, Lavrov described NATO as “unable to provide a proper response to the growing main threat of modern times, which is terrorism.”
Moscow’s persistent theme is that NATO should be left to sink into redundancy while the US and Russia cooperate on counterterrorism.
“I proceed from the premise that Mr Putin and Mr Trump understand their national interests,” Lavrov told a Moscow audience. “They want to overcome the current abnormality and start negotiating specific issues that affect bilateral relations, including business interests and the resolution of international problems.”
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has been a guest of Trump’s at the White House, was in the room as Lavrov spoke, and the Russian foreign minister applauded him for having followed a balance-of-powers approach when he was making US foreign policy during the Cold War.
Suchkov said Moscow’s immediate demand was the return of two Russian diplomatic compounds, in Maryland and New York, from where its officials were expelled by the administration of former US president Barack Obama in December last year in retaliation over the Kremlin’s interference in last year’s US presidential election campaign.
The White House led by Trump has explored handing back the sites, perhaps stripped of diplomatic immunity, but the issue is politically fraught in Washington at a time when the city is gripped by the Russia investigations.
However, outside the Oval Office there is entrenched opposition to any relaxation of sanctions that would imply acceptance of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in east Ukraine, a formerly covert operation which Lavrov officially acknowledged for the first time in his Moscow speech on Friday last week.
The US Senate has voted by 98 to two to strengthen sanctions on Russia.
The US House of Representatives is expected to vote on the measures in the days following the Trump-Putin meeting. Any unilateral action by Trump in Hamburg to relax pressure on Moscow is liable to cause a backlash in Washington.
Whether or not the US president and his associates are found to have directly colluded with Moscow, there is no question Trump has offered a softer, less judgmental, relationship with Russia.
There is likewise little doubt Putin ordered his intelligence services to skew the election in Trump’s direction.
In Hamburg, meeting face-to-face with a US president hobbled by constraint, the Russian president will be looking for what he can salvage from that investment.
TRUMP ON PUTIN
Trump has spoken, sometimes gushingly, about Putin on more than 80 occasions in the past few years.
“Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” June 2013.
“I do have a relationship with him.” November 2013.
“When I went to Russia with the Miss Universe pageant, [Putin] contacted me and was so nice.” February 2014.
“He could not have been nicer. He was so nice and so everything, but you have to give him credit that what he’s doing for that country in terms of their world prestige is very strong.” April 2014.
“I own Miss Universe, I was in Russia, I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.” May 2014.
“Putin is a nicer person than I am.” September 2015.
“I will tell you that I think in terms of leadership [Putin] is getting an ‘A,’ and our president is not doing so well.” September 2015.
“Yes [we met], a long time ago. We got along great, by the way.” October 2015.
“I think the biggest thing we have is that we were on ‘60 Minutes’ together and we had fantastic ratings. One of your best-rated shows in a long time? So we were stablemates.” October 2015.
“I have no relationship with him other than he called me a genius.” February last year.
“I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is. He said one nice thing about me. He said I’m a genius. I said thank you very much to the newspaper and that was the end of it. I never met Putin.” July last year.
“There are a lot of killers? Do you think our country is so innocent? Do you think our country is so innocent?” February.
“And I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia. President Putin called me up very nicely to congratulate me on the win of the election.” February.
PUTIN ON TRUMP
Putin has been far more tight-lipped with just a few references to Trump.
“He is a very colorful and talented man, no doubt about that he is the absolute leader of the presidential race, as we see it today. He says that he wants to move to another level of relations, to a deeper level of relations with Russia. How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome it.” December 2015.
“I only said that he was a bright person. Isn’t he bright? He is. I did not say anything else about him.” June last year.
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