The Kremlin has announced that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold a joint press conference following their highly anticipated talks in Alaska on Friday, setting up another potential disaster for the U.S. president.
Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov confirmed the conference will take place after Trump and Putin hold an initial one-on-one meeting with interpreters in Anchorage, Russian state-owned news agency Interfax reported.
Negotiations over a Ukraine ceasefire are expected to dominate Friday’s summit. Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Putin for ignoring his pleas for a peace deal and continuing to kill civilians and bombard Ukrainian cities.
On Wednesday, Trump threatened Putin with “severe consequences” if Russia did not end the war, without specifying further.
The Kremlin announced the press conference before any confirmation from the White House, a move suggesting Moscow was keen to get the word out.
The last time Trump and Putin shared a podium was in 2018 in Helsinki, where Trump was widely seen as weak and powerless for failing to challenge or denounce Putin, and even hoped for an “extraordinary relationship” between them to blossom.
During the infamous press conference, Trump dismissed the assessment of his own intelligence agencies who concluded that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election, and instead sided with the Russian leader’s assessment.
“President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump said while standing right next to Putin.
“It will be remembered as the most appalling public display of capitulation by a U.S. president to a Kremlin leader ever,” Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, wrote in a July 2018 opinion piece The Washington Post.
The press conference in Helsinki was so painful to watch that Fiona Hill, Trump’s then top Russia adviser, later told the BBC she considered “faking some kind of medical emergency and throwing myself backwards with a loud blood curdling scream into the media” to get it to end.
Ahead of the Alaska summit, experts are questioning whether Trump will stick to his recent tough-guy act or fold to Putin again.
“It’s a reasonable concern to think that Trump will be bamboozled by Putin and cut a terrible deal at Ukraine’s expense,” Dan Fried, a diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Poland, told Reuters. “[But] There’s a reasonable prospect that the administration will wake up to the fact that Putin is still playing them.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
The post Cue the Popcorn: Kremlin Boasts Putin and Trump Will Hold Joint Press Conference appeared first on The Daily Beast.
