Putin invites Trump to Moscow: a brief account of previous US Presidents' visits to Russia

Indian Express

a day ago

The inconclusive meeting in Anchorage ended with Russia President Vladimir Putin inviting US President Donald Trump to Moscow.
'Next time in Moscow,' Putin said.
'Ooh, that's an interesting one. I don't know. I'll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening,' Trump replied.
If Trump were to accept Putin's invitation, he would be the first American President to set foot on Russian soil since 2013, and the first time to visit Moscow since 2009.
In fact, American Presidents have very rarely visited Russia.
Till date, eight American Presidents have taken a total of 21 trips to Russia, including six to the erstwhile Soviet Union. Six American Presidents have made a total of 14 trips to Moscow.
These visits — and the lack thereof for long periods of time — reflected the ups and downs in the relationship between the United States and Russia over the years.
In February 1945, Franklin D Roosevelt travelled to Yalta in Crimea, then a part of the Russian Soviet Republic, to participate in a landmark conference that would decide the fate of post-World War II Europe. He was the first American President to set foot in Eastern Europe.
Over the next 46 years, with the United States and the Soviet Union locked in a battle for global supremacy during the Cold War, American Presidents would make only five trips to Russia.
Three of these came between 1972 and 1974, in the early years of the détente that began during the Presidency of Richard Nixon.
Nixon's first visit to Moscow in May 1972 — the first ever by an American President to the city — saw him meet Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, and ink the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), and the US–Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement.
In June 1974, Nixon once again met Brezhnev Moscow, and this time signed the Threshold Test Ban Treaty.
His successor, Gerald R Ford, hopped across the Northern Pacific to meet Brezhnev at Vladivostok in November the same year. The two continued the ongoing discussions on strategic arms, but did not sign any major treaty.
By the end of the 1970s, however, the détente was all but over and the two superpowers were once again on the brink of confrontation. It was not until the very last years of the Cold War — and the Soviet Union — that American Presidents would travel to Russia once again.
Ronald Reagan met General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in May-June 1988, just as the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble, and signed a number of agreements including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
His successor George H W Bush visited both Moscow and Kyiv in July-August 1991. Bush Sr signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), and more notably, addressed the Ukrainian Parliament, merely three weeks before Ukraine declared independence from the USSR.
The Soviet Union would collapse three months after Bush's speech.
The fall of the Soviet Union set the stage for a decade and a half of unparalleled bonhomie between Moscow and Washington, as the new Russian Federation tried to join the global capitalist order.
Between 1993 and 2008, American Presidents visited Russia a whopping 13 times, often twice in a year and never at a gap of more than two years.
In January 1993, Bush Sr met Russia President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow and signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II).
In January 1994, Bill Clinton visited Kyiv and Moscow to meet Ukraine President President Leonid Kravchuk and Yeltsin respectively, and signed a treaty that would see Ukraine forego nuclear weapons positioned on its soil.
This would be the first of Clinton's five visits to Russia: he went to Moscow once again in May 1995 to attend celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Nazi surrender; attended the G-7 summit in St Petersburg in April 1996 before heading to Moscow to hold a summit meeting with Yeltsin; held another summit meeting with Yeltsin in Moscow in September 1998; and met Putin and addressed the Duma in June 2000.
Clinton's successor, George W Bush, would visit Russia seven times.
In May 2002, Bush and Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) in Moscow. Bush met Putin once again in November that year, this time in St Petersburg.
Bush was invited to attend St Petersburg's 300th anniversary celebrations in 2003. In 2005, he met Putin in Moscow to attend the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Nazi surrender.
In 2006, Bush made two trips to Russia: in July for the G-8 summit in St Petersburg, during which he met a number of world leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and in November, for a tête-à-tête with Putin in Moscow.
Bush's final visit to Russia came in April 2008, when he met with Putin and soon-to-be President Dmitry Medvedev in Sochi.
The Bucharest NATO Summit of 2008 marked a turning point for Russia's relations with the West, specifically the US.
The summit saw NATO accept former Warsaw Pact members Albania and Croatia into the alliance (they would officially be inducted in 2009) already having crept closer to Russian borders over the previous decade.
More importantly, the summit declaration 'welcomed Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO'.
Analysts such as John Mearsheimer have long argued that this was the trigger for increased tensions between the US and Russia, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and ultimately the invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2022.
After the Bucharest Summit, Barack Obama visited Russia twice as US President: in Moscow in 2009, when he met Medvedev and Putin (Prime Minister at the time), and St Petersburg in 2013, for the G-20 meeting.
No American President has set foot on Russian soil since.
For Putin, who has long viewed the Trump White House as a potential ally for Moscow in Washington, securing a visit from the US President would be a major breakthrough, and perhaps a signal of a broader realignment in the global order.