The long-anticipated Trump-Putin summit is now official. The US president and the Russian president will meet, likely in July, according to the Wall Street Journal. The meeting was announced by US National Security Adviser John Bolton after he met with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday; the timing and location will be announced Thursday. The one-on-one meeting—which is expected to be held while President Trump is in Europe for the NATO summit next month—will cover Syria, arms-control, and the relationship between the two countries. The primary issues in US-Russia relations are Russia’s interventions in the Ukraine and Syria, the country's interference in the 2016 US election, and its alleged role in the poisoning of a former double agent and his daughter in the UK. This will be Trump and Putin's first official sit-down, as opposed to encounters they've had on the sidelines of larger events, the Washington Post reports.
NATO partners are pushing for the meeting to take place after the NATO summit in mid-July, due to concerns that Trump and Putin could agree to something that they oppose, reports CNN. Some members, for example, fear that the current efforts to sanction and isolate Moscow could be undone by President Trump. "No one knows what he'll walk out saying,” one western official told CNN. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will also meet, likely before the presidents do. “The president’s been unambiguous since he took office that there are places where Russia is working against the United States, but many places where we work together,” Pompeo told MSNBC last week. Putin, speaking in advance of Bolton's visit, sounded optimistic about the future of US-Russia relations, saying he hoped to discuss "what both sides could do to restore full-fledged relations on the basis of equality and respect for each other’s interests." (More Donald Trump stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
