President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will sit down for an official bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Friday rather than an informal pull-aside meeting.
The meeting, confirmed by both the White House and the Kremlin on Tuesday, will be the first in-person meeting between the two leaders and the first official bilateral meeting between a US and Russian president in nearly two years.
The meeting comes amid ongoing tensions between the two countries stemming from Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, its annexation of Ukrainian territory and its support of the Syrian regime.
"It is planned as a fully-fledged, 'seated' meeting," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday, according to the state-run TASS news agency.
National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton also confirmed that the two leaders will sit down together Friday for a bilateral meeting.
The format remained an open question through this weekend. Homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that the parameters of the meeting had not yet "been set."
There are lots of pundits weighing in on this and suggesting that Trump needs to bring up the Russian interference in the 2016 election or else he will be forever Putin's poodle.
But I am convinced that Trump is already Putin's poodle and that the topic will never come up.
Let's face it Putin would never admit anything, but then again Trump does not want him to admit anything.
Trump is terrified that his election victory will be made illegitimate, and the first step toward doing that would be for Putin to admit that he helped him to win.
It serves neither one to even broach the topic, and so they will talk about other things instead, and don't think that THOSE topics will be in any way controversial either.
Source http://ift.tt/2tGHpji
