Trump Insists on Having One-on-One Meeting With Putin Without Aides, Reports Say
President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin one-on-one. Trump and Putin are formally meeting on behalf of just their two respective countries for the first time on July 16 in Helsinki, Finland.
The announcement for the high-profile meeting went out just last week, with both the White House and Moscow announcing the summit scheduled in about two weeks from now. This upcoming high profile meeting in Helsinki will only be the third time that the two Presidents of their respective countries would meet in the same room.
With the event coming up, a source informed CNN that President Donald Trump would like to take the opportunity to meet with President Vladimir Putin rather privately, without the presence of his aides, with only translators to be present as needed.
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Afterward, other aides are to join the highly anticipated summit sometime later. Like in the case with the Singapore summit, Trump is reportedly looking for an individual meeting with his counterpart before the delegation proper comes together with all the members from both sides.
In his June 12 meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, Trump met with him for about an hour with just the translators present for a one-on-one meeting as well. Trump took away from that meeting a "very, very good" impression at the time.
While these kinds of personal meetings could go some way towards establishing a good relationship between the two leaders before the rest of their aides join in, some U.S. officials are reportedly concerned about just Trump and Putin meeting by themselves.
Without witnesses and note-takers, it would be hard to establish if any agreements have been made between them. National Security Adviser John Bolton, however, had earlier assuaged these fears by downplaying the agenda for the July 16 meeting.
"The goal of this meeting really is for the two leaders to have a chance to sit down, not in the context of some larger multilateral meeting, but just the two of them, to go over what is on their mind about a whole range of issues," Bolton said on Sunday, July 1.
