Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
The U.S. military location, whose selection two White House officials revealed to CNN, houses an Air Force base and an Army fort, which merged in 2010. The summit will occur there and not in Russia, as Trump had said on Monday—twice.
The site, in Alaska’s most populous city, was the only suitable option, organizers said, even though the White House hadn’t been keen on the visuals of welcoming Putin to a U.S. military base, according to CNN.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Daily Beast inquiry about the optics of doing so. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced earlier Tuesday that Anchorage would host the summit, but she did not specify the location.
Last week, the Trump administration had reportedly been discussing the possibility of inviting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the summit as well. But the White House did not provide an update on that front, either.
Zelensky wrote in a social media post last week in response to those reports: ”Ukraine is not afraid of meetings and expects the same brave approach from the Russian side. It is time we ended the war. Thank you to everyone who is helping.”
Late last month, Trump moved up his deadline for Putin to agree to a ceasefire deal. That date has since come and gone.
The last time Putin had an in-person meeting with a U.S. president was in Geneva in 2021. That was his only such encounter with Joe Biden during his four years in office, and it occurred a year before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Trump, who repeatedly said while campaigning for president that he would end the war on his first day in office or even sooner, met Putin several times during his first term, most infamously in Helsinki in 2018.
There, Trump said he believed Putin’s denial that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, which is what Trump’s own intelligence agencies had concluded.
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