The forthcoming meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit has got to be the most anticipated political moment of the year. The handshake, smiles, body language and words will all be scrutinized to parse significance in the encounter between the leaders of the world’s two superpowers.
Sections of the American media will no doubt be looking for secret signals between agent Trump and the former KGB spy Putin to confirm their suspicions it was the Kremlin that orchestrated the US presidential election to get Trump into the White House. That spy-thriller narrative has been running non-stop in prominent US news outlets – and yet six months after Trump’s inauguration not even a single bit of hard evidence has emerged to support the allegations of collusion. It’s a spy fantasy that has taken on a life of its own, which even the CNN channel – one of the biggest purveyors of the Trump-Russia trope – has recently been caught out disclosing quietly that it’s a nothing burger.
Nonetheless, on a more serious level, the meeting between Trump and Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit next weekend will have a moment of truth quality. It’s their first encounter, although the two leaders have held at least two phone conversations in the past six months.
Confirming that the Trump-Putin one-on-one is scheduled during the Hamburg summit, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that the meeting will clarify the state of bilateral relations between Washington and Moscow.
We expect the Hamburg meeting between our presidents to clarify the prospects for Russian-US cooperation, said Lavrov speaking in Moscow last Friday at the Primakov Readings conference.
This post was published at 21st Century Wire on JULY 3, 2017.
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