President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold a summit, Russia announced on Wednesday.
A date and location for the meeting will be announced on Thursday.
The news came while White House national security adviser John Bolton was in Moscow for a round of high-level meetings on U.S.-Russia relations.
“I can say that an agreement has been reached on holding the summit, even an agreement on the time and venue,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters, per TASS, a state-run outlet. “We will presumably announce that tomorrow together with our US counterparts.”
Trump and Putin have had two face-to-face meetings on the sidelines of broader diplomatic summits, but this next encounter would be the first bilateral discussion between the two leaders. Interest in the Trump-Putin meeting spiked following the president’s meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“A very convenient place for us and the American side has been selected in a third country,” Ushakov said.
Helsinki, Finland is regarded as the likeliest location, although earlier reports had Vienna, Austria as a potential host.
Putin said earlier Wednesday that he hopes the meeting will produce a restoration of “full-format relations” between the United States and Russia. Trump’s administration has maintained that such a rehabilitation can take place only if Putin abandons his aggressive policies, particularly the invasion of Ukraine and electoral interference.
“I think both parties and certainly this administration, is alive to the tendency of Vladimir Putin to abuse one-sided openings,” Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell said during a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
But Trump also wants additional dialogue with Putin, to the point of calling for Russia to be allowed to rejoin the G-7, an economic bloc of the world’s leading industrialized democracies. Russia was suspended from the group as a punishment for the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.
“Now, I’m not for Russia. I’m for the United States,” Trump told Fox News while explaining the call. ”But, as an example, if Vladimir Putin were sitting next to me at a table instead of one of the others … I could say, ‘would you do me a favor and get out of Syria? Would you do me a favor, would you get out of Ukraine?'”
