Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump may meet at the APEC summit in Vietnam, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
"We do not rule out the possibility of holding such a meeting, and it is actually being coordinated now. As soon as all details are clarified, a corresponding announcement will be made," TASS cited Peskov as saying.
He added that the importance of any contact between the Russian and US presidents and its significance "in all international affairs can hardly be overestimated."
On Thursday, Donald Trump said that he can hold a meeting with Putin during a Pacific Rim visit. Trump said that Putin is very important, because Russia may help the US with North Korea and Syria and that Ukraine should also be discussed. Trump will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Vietnam’s Da Nang on November 10. He will also attend a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Manila on November 12-13.
Putin and Trump first met face-to-face at the G20 summit in Hamburg this past July.
The director of the Roosevelt Fund of Study of the US at Moscow State University, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Yuri Rogulev, speaking with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the agenda of the second meeting of the presidents will address the problems of hot spots, which concern both the US and Russia. "Of course, North Korea and Syria will be discussed, perhaps Ukraine, at least, President Trump said yesterday he would like to talk specifically about it," the expert noted.
According to Rogulev, Trump is now extremely limited in his ability to negotiate with Putin at his discretion. "For Trump it would be really important to achieve any positive arrangements in order to show the success of its foreign policy - but the big question is how such a success will be perceived in the US. It is possible that any agreements, even if he will be able to achieve them, will not be taken positively by Congress. But in the eyes of the US society the meeting with Putin will be in favor of Trump," he pointed out.
At the same time, the director of the Roosevelt Fund of Study of the US at Moscow State University warned that the meeting is unlikely to help defuse the current tensions in the relations between the two countries. "We should not expect any serious consequences, because this is not a meeting prepared in advance for a long time. I do not think that the parties are sufficiently progressed to prepare such decisions. Most likely, there will be general agreements, which will have to be realized after the meeting," Yury Rogulev concluded.
The President of the National Strategy Institute, Mikhail Remizov, in turn, noted the key problem of the coming negotiations. "And the problem is that there is no agreement entity from the US side. Because of it meetings look like ritual events that are held because it will be even worse not to held them. It is hardly possible to expect to make progress for the better during the meeting, simply because Trump does not have enough freedom of maneuver in Russian affairs," he explained.
The reason for this problem is the great limitation of Trump's capabilities in the Russian theme. "I'm not sure that even purely symbolic things happening now in the diplomatic sphere can be solved at the presidential level now. Trump could try to sell diplomatic normalization as a concession, for which the Russian side must pay something in real politics. I sincerely hope that the Russian side will not take this kind of approach seriously," Mikhail Remizov said.
This is the difference between the coming meeting and the first one, where a constructive agenda still persisted. "At the first meeting, they tried to agree on a working group on cybersecurity, where mutual claims and joint interests could be discussed. But now we see that this simple, non-binding initiative was blocked, which means there is nothing to talk about, there is no room for maneuver for any agreements," the President of the National Strategy Institute summarized.
