US officials race to prepare for historic Trump-Putin summit

Saudi Gazette

4 days ago

WASHINGTON — American officials scrambling this weekend to identify and lock down a venue for Friday's summit between President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart quickly discovered a major snag: summertime is peak tourist season in Alaska, and options both available and equipped to host the two world leaders were severely limited.
When word reached certain prominent Alaskans that Trump and Putin were coming, a few began reaching out to the president's allies with a proposition: could their home be an option? It's unclear if those offers ever reached White House officials, who were calling sites in Juneau, the state capital, along with Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Organizers of the summit soon came to believe the only city in the massive state with viable options for the summit would be Anchorage. And only Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, on the northern edge of the city, would meet the security requirements for the historic meeting, though the White House had hoped to avoid the optics of hosting the Russian leader and his entourage on a US military installation.
That is where the two men will meet Friday, two White House officials said.
The struggle underscored the rush now underway to nail down the details of Friday's meeting, the first time the top US and Russian leaders have met in more than four years. The summit is still largely a work in progress as US and Russian officials make haste to prepare for the high-profile encounter. The two countries' top diplomats — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — spoke Tuesday to discuss 'certain aspects of preparation,' according to Russia's foreign ministry.
Usually, a high-stakes summit with a US adversary would be preceded by extensive negotiations over the agenda and outcomes. But Trump himself has said he is approaching the meeting as a 'feel-out' session, with few advance expectations for how it will proceed. The White House on Tuesday termed it a 'listening session.'
'The president feels like, 'look, I've got to look at this guy across the table. I need to see him face to face. I need to hear him one-on-one. I need to make an assessment by looking at him,'' Rubio said in a morning radio interview Tuesday with Sid Rosenberg, offering one explanation for why Trump's five known phone calls with Putin this year wouldn't suffice in determining the Russian leader's intentions.
Trump's administration and the Kremlin landed on Alaska as the site for the summit after a lengthy behind-the-scenes back-and-forth, according to people familiar with the matter. There were few places that would work for the sit-down, the people said, particularly given a war crimes warrant issued for Putin's arrest by the International Criminal Court in 2023.
With that fact looming, Russia balked at a European destination — even in a city like Vienna or Geneva, where US and Russian leaders have met dating back to the Cold War. While Putin himself raised the United Arab Emirates as an 'entirely suitable' location, many inside the White House hoped to avoid another lengthy trek to the Middle East after Trump's visit in May.
In the end, sources said, it came down to Hungary — whose Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is close to both Trump and Putin — and the United States as possible hosts, according to two US officials.
American officials were pleased and somewhat surprised when the Russian president agreed to a meeting on US soil — on land that once was part of the Russian empire, no less.
'I thought it was very respectful that the president of Russia is coming to our country as opposed to us going to his country or even a third-party place,' Trump said this week, as his team was rushing to finalize details of the summit.
Others were not so taken.
'The only better place for Putin than Alaska would be if the summit were being held in Moscow,' said Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton, who fell out with Trump during his first term. 'So, the initial setup, I think, is a great victory for Putin.'
The last time an American president met with Putin — President Joe Biden's 2021 summit in Geneva — the date and venue were announced three weeks ahead of time. But the planning between Russian and American officials started months before that.
Biden, on a week-long swing through Europe, spent the days leading up to the sit-down in intensive preparation with top advisers, blocking out time in the mornings to parse potential directions the conversation could take and anticipate some of Putin's moves. He consulted other leaders, including the German chancellor, for pointers on how to approach the notoriously wily Russian leader.
By the time the summit arrived, aides had planned the day down to the most minute detail, including what order the leaders would arrive, how long each session would last and what type of flower would sit on the table (it was white roses). American officials even ensured there were bottles of orange Gatorade — labeled 'POTUS' — inside a refrigerator at the 18th-century villa where the meeting took place.
During Trump's first term, he and Putin sat one-on-one in Helsinki, Finland, during a summit in 2018 that ended with a remarkable moment when Trump sided with Putin over US intelligence agencies on the question of Russian election interference. Trump also met Putin alone in 2017, during their first encounter at the G20 summit in Hamburg.
Mystery over meeting's origins
While American and Russian officials have been in extensive conversations to prepare for the sit-down since it was agreed to last week, the encounter that prompted the event remains something of a mystery. Trump's foreign envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow last Wednesday for a meeting with Putin that resulted in the decision to meet, though what exactly Putin said in the meeting is still largely unknown.
European officials spent much of the last week trying to ascertain the parameters of a peace deal that Putin offered up, but some said they were frustrated by the lack of clarity offered by Witkoff, a real estate developer and longtime friend of Trump's.
Trump plans to hear from European leaders and Ukraine in a virtual meeting on Wednesday, arranged by the Germans so the president can get their perspective ahead of the Friday meeting. And he has promised to get on the phone with them, along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, immediately after the summit concludes.
But Zelensky isn't expected to be in Alaska for the summit, so any potential trilateral meeting is off the table for now.
Instead, Trump will spend at least part of the summit meeting with Putin one-on-one, the White House said Tuesday, allowing time for the two men to carry out a discussion unheard by anyone else aside from their translators.
'That's part of the plan,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said when asked whether the two presidents would meet as a pair. 'As for the other mechanics and logistics, I will let our team speak to that when they're ironed out.'
It's not atypical for leaders to meet alone with their counterparts, but Trump and Putin's relationship has been the subject of intense scrutiny. And during Trump's first term, even senior officials said they sometimes were left in the dark about what was discussed when aides were left out. In Trump's previous two meetings with Putin, both encounters included translators, but not high-ranking aides. After the Germany meeting, Trump reportedly asked his translator for his notes.
For his part, Putin has spent the days ahead of Friday's meeting placing phone calls to his remaining global allies — including some who have staged their own high-profile summits with Trump.
That included North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the Kremlin said Tuesday, who met three times with Trump during his first term, but still hasn't abandoned his nuclear weapons. — CNN