![\"Vladimir](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/https:\/\/d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net\/production\/c249521b-8b03-4aa5-8557-5929a61ad0b3.jpg\")
After their meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Donald Trump questioned the analysis of his own intelligence team about Vladimir Putin \u00a9 Yuri Kadobnov\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\nDonald Trump and Vladimir Putin have a history of bizarre encounters.<\/p>\n
There was the pair\u2019s first meeting in Germany when Trump confiscated his interpreter\u2019s notes to conceal any evidence of what had happened in the room. The time in Vietnam where Trump took at face value Putin\u2019s insistence that Moscow had not meddled in the 2016 election. And their summit in Helsinki when Trump questioned the analysis of his own intelligence services given Putin\u2019s strong denial.<\/p>\n
Now, as the two leaders prepare for their first face-to-face meeting since Trump returned to the White House, policymakers and analysts are braced for an unconventional meeting that will showcase a less encumbered Trump than he was in his first term.<\/p>\n
Many fear that if these previous encounters are any indication, it is Putin, the seasoned KGB operative turned strongman, who will gain the upper hand \u2014 not the other way around.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no way you can go from no progress to a summit that ends the war in less than a week,\u201d said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation. \u201cBut Trump has this undying belief in his own charisma and ability to persuade his counterparts in what he thinks is logical and right.\u201d<\/p>\n
After their meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Donald Trump questioned the analysis of his own intelligence team about Vladimir Putin \u00a9 Yuri Kadobnov\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Former French president Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, who in 2015 co-led peace negotiations with then German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Putin over Ukraine, has a warning for the US president: \u201cPutin\u2019s technique is professional lying.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump would be well advised to show that he has detailed knowledge of the situation on the ground,\u201d Hollande told the Financial Times.<\/p>\n
When Trump and Putin met for the first time, in July 2017, the US leader was weighed down by the probe into alleged Russian election meddling and a mutual wariness between Trump and his own foreign policy advisers.<\/p>\n
The two presidents huddled on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Hamburg, joined by Russia\u2019s foreign minister and Trump\u2019s then state secretary and two interpreters. Trump later took his interpreter\u2019s notes and asked the interpreter not to brief anyone on the contents of the meeting.<\/p>\n
Then at a dinner that night, Trump approached Putin for a one-on-one aside \u2014 with just Putin\u2019s interpreter<\/a> and no US officials present.<\/p>\n At their next meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vietnam that November, Trump reiterated Putin\u2019s claims that Russia had not interfered in the US election.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two had another face-to-face meeting in Helsinki in July 2018 where they were joined only by their respective interpreters. When asked at a news conference whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president, Trump said he trusted both but noted: \u201cPresident Putin says it\u2019s not Russia. I don\u2019t see any reason why it would be.\u201d <\/p>\n The two men met again, informally, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires later that year, where Trump again did not take any interpreter or note-taker<\/a> with him.<\/a><\/p>\n This week\u2019s summit represents the latest chance for Trump to once again recast his relationship with Putin and adopt a harsher stance on the Russian president. Few expect he will take the opportunity. <\/p>\n \u201cPutin will try to convince Trump that [the Russian] position is better than it actually is. While for Trump it is much more important to make this deal and to claim it [as] his new peacekeeping victory,\u201d said Kirill Rogov, a sociologist and visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. \u201cIt ends in nothing, but Trump avoids the need to take decisive action.\u201d<\/p>\n Hollande, who spent 17 hours in the capital of Belarus in February 2015 to seal the so-called Minsk 2 accord on a ceasefire in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, said that Putin will probably play for time.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s in no hurry,\u201d the former French president said. \u201cHe knows that he will still be in power in a month, two years, maybe until the end of his life. Trump is in a hurry because he has pledged to resolve all the world\u2019s conflicts and wants results.\u201d<\/p>\n Lengthy digressions were also a pattern, Hollande recalled. \u201cPutin is going to start the meeting by retelling the whole story. It could last an hour, longer, if you don\u2019t cut him off. The Russian method of negotiation is that it should last a long time but that nothing much happens,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cBut in the end, he would always offer an opening \u2014 a mediation, another meeting, a working group \u2014 so that the other side could say, see, Putin has shifted a little.\u201d<\/p>\n Enunciating plain lies was also one of the Russian leader\u2019s tricks, Hollande said. For instance Putin insisted he had no contact with the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, despite funding and supporting them militarily. \u201cIt was such a big lie that it was impressive,\u201d Hollande said.<\/p>\n A German diplomat involved in the Minsk negotiations described Putin as \u201cone of the most skilled negotiators\u201d. \u201cHe knows all the subjects, legal reasoning in details, but always manipulates facts. You have to know your facts as well as he does.\u201d <\/p>\n But facts are not Trump\u2019s forte, he said. In early 2017, Merkel arranged a call with the US president to explain how Putin was refusing to implement the Minsk accord. Trump just said thank you and hung up. Later US advisers told Merkel\u2019s team that Trump was furious because she had lectured him. \u201cNot only he doesn\u2019t love facts, but he also has his prejudices, and Putin knows that,\u201d the diplomat said.<\/p>\n In her memoirs, Merkel writes that she and Trump \u201cwere talking on two different levels: Trump on the emotional; I on the factual.\u201d<\/p>\n Putin has a \u201cvery structured, very meticulous bad faith,\u201d said a former French adviser in Hollande\u2019s negotiating team. When the Russian leader refused to accept any external monitoring of the Ukrainian-Russian border, he \u201cclaimed it was not violated\u201d, the adviser said. \u201cBut of course it\u2019s because the Russians crossed it whenever they liked.\u201d<\/p>\n Of the Alaska meeting, the adviser said: \u201cThe Russians are not going to strike a deal. Putin just needs Trump to stop supporting Ukraine, which is Trump\u2019s natural inclination anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n Rogov, the sociologist, said that Putin might be interested in negotiations more than before as the Russian summer offensive in Ukraine had been less successful than last year\u2019s. The prospect of Trump scaring India off as an oil customer with the threat of tariffs further twisted Putin\u2019s arm, he added.<\/p>\n Compared with his first administration, when Trump was constrained by an assertive Congress and by officials who sought to place guardrails on his relationship with Putin, the US president now faces fewer checks on his power. Republican lawmakers are cowed and the foreign policy apparatus has been sidelined. <\/p>\n \u201cHe is unconstrained,\u201d said a senior US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n Trump and Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, have been running the operation like two \u201cdesk hands\u201d, said Andrew Weiss, vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.<\/p>\n \u201cWe now have Trump without guardrails or counterweights in his own administration sitting with Putin, who has been in that position for a decade or so of not having peers in his own immediate proximity,\u201d Weiss said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have a history of bizarre encounters. There was the pair\u2019s first meeting in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[332],"class_list":{"0":"post-338760","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-russia"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115016486424076123","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Russian](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/https:\/\/d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net\/production\/aa27fcbe-2013-4422-9607-0b791c6a1042.jpg\")
Former French president Fran\u00e7ois Hollande and then-German chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 co-led peace negotiations with Putin and then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, over Ukraine \u00a9 Mykola Lazarenko\/AP<\/p>\n