{"id":340811,"date":"2025-08-13T09:39:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T09:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/340811\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T09:39:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T09:39:10","slug":"trump-alone-in-a-room-with-putin-is-a-recipe-for-disaster-just-look-to-their-last-meeting-world-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/340811\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump alone in a room with Putin is a recipe for disaster \u2013 just look to their last meeting | World news"},"content":{"rendered":"

The lessons of Helsinki are clear: putting Donald Trump alone in a room with Vladimir Putin<\/a> is an unpredictable \u2013 and often dangerous \u2013 affair.<\/p>\n

It was 2018 when the two leaders met at the invitation of Sauli Niinist\u00f6, the Finnish president<\/a>, to discuss a collapse in US-Russia relations, accusations of elections interference, and the grinding war in east Ukraine, among other topics.<\/p>\n

By the time he came out of the room, Trump looked dazzled by the Kremlin leader. Asked at a press conference about the conclusions of the US intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the elections, Trump said: \u201cPresident Putin says it\u2019s not Russia. I don\u2019t see any reason why it would be.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Fiona Hill, Trump\u2019s senior Kremlin adviser on the US national security council, later said that she had considered pulling a fire alarm or faking a medical emergency to end the press conference.<\/p>\n

Somehow, the stakes are even higher as Trump and Putin plan to meet on Friday in Anchorage, Alaska<\/a>, where Trump has said the two will discuss \u201cland swapping\u201d in Putin\u2019s first meeting with a G7 leader since his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. European leaders are fearful that Trump could once again emerge from a closed-door meeting preaching the Kremlin gospel.<\/p>\n

The White House has been lowering expectations for the summit \u2013 a sign that no concrete deal is on the table. \u201cThis is really a feel-out meeting, a little bit,\u201d<\/a> Trump said during a news conference on Monday. He said he would know within the first few minutes whether or not Putin was ready for a ceasefire and would pass that on to Ukraine\u2019s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders. \u201cI may say, \u2018Lots of luck, keep fighting.\u2019 Or I may say, \u2018We can make a deal,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But Putin will still try his luck to shape Trump\u2019s image of what a peace deal could entail in a way that will bring maximum benefit to the Kremlin. Putin \u201cwants a deal with Trump that will be presented to Kyiv and other European capitals as a fait accompli,\u201d wrote John Herbst, senior director of the Atlantic Council\u2019s Eurasia Center and a former ambassador to Ukraine<\/a>. The lack of invites for European leaders \u201chas the smell of the Yalta Conference in 1945 \u2026 where the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom decided the fate of half of Europe over the heads of those nations\u201d.<\/p>\n

Europe and Ukraine have pushed back. Ahead of the summit, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine would not cede Russia territory that it could use to launch a new offensive<\/a>, effectively ruling out Trump\u2019s predictions that \u201cthere will be some [land] swapping\u201d.<\/p>\n

The ad-hoc nature of Trump\u2019s approach to foreign policy can play into the hands of the US\u2019s foreign adversaries \u2013 but it has frustrated them too. Leaders like president Xi Jinping of China are said to prefer more advance work before getting into the room with Trump specifically because of his unpredictability. Russia<\/a> too has become frustrated with the lack of process in the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

But that has not stopped Putin from taking his chances by stepping into the ring with Trump for their first one-on-one meeting of this administration.<\/p>\n

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that the meeting between Trump and Putin would be one-on-one, and a \u201clistening exercise\u201d for Trump during which he could suss out the Russian point of view.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the way Trump does it. He just wings it,\u201d said Hill, the former presidential aide.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd Putin likes sparring \u2026 he prides himself on being able to be light on his feet in these kinds of settings,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The lack of advisers in the room has raised a key question: will any agreements made in a private setting, even if interpreters or other notetakers are present, lead to lasting outcomes?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of like a meeting falling in the forest,\u201d said Hill.<\/p>\n

A similar event took place during the Helsinki summit, when Trump exited the room and said that he had made an agreement with Putin for US law enforcement to have access to the GRU operatives accused of influencing the US elections. Putin later said in turn that he would have access to Americans responsible for pushing for the anti-corruption Magnitsky Act.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, that went nowhere,\u201d Hill said. \u201cTrump hadn\u2019t fully understood what Putin had said to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn other words, you know, there is a meeting or something, it doesn\u2019t solidify into something,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The lessons of Helsinki are clear: putting Donald Trump alone in a room with Vladimir Putin is an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[332],"class_list":{"0":"post-340811","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":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340811","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=340811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}