U.S. in talks for potential Trump-Putin summit: WSJ

NEW YORK, June 2 (APP):The United States is preparing for a potential summit between President Donald Trump and Russian
President Vladimir Putin, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The report noted that U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman, has been in Washington, to coordinate a possible meeting.
“This has been an ongoing project of Ambassador Huntsman, stretching back months, of getting a formal
meeting between Putin and Trump,” a senior administration official was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
If it comes to fruition, the summit would be the third meeting between Trump and Putin. The two leaders met
on the sidelines of Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, last July and again in Vietnam during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam in November.
Topics would likely to be discussed at the summit include Syria, Ukraine, and nuclear-arms control,
according to the report.
During a phone call between the two leaders in March, Trump extended an invitation to Putin to come to Washington.
The prospective meeting would come at a point of heightened tensions between the Washington and
Moscow.
The U.S. intelligence community revealed in a report made public last year that Russia had sought to
meddle in the 2016 presidential election to sway the race in Trump’s favour.
Russia’s role in the election and whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Moscow is still the subject of a criminal investigation being conducted by US special counsel Robert Mueller.
The U.S. has also condemned Moscow’s support for the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad,
as well as Russia’s military intervention in eastern Ukraine.
Relations became even frostier in March, when the U.S. and dozens of other countries expelled Russian diplomats from their borders in response to the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in the U.K.
with a military-grade nerve agent.
Russia has denied responsibility for that poisoning, and has blamed the U.S. for orchestrating a blackmail campaign against it.