President Trump has told aides he’d like to hold an in-person meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the November election.
Administration officials have explored various times and locations for another Trump-Putin summit, including potentially next month in New York, four sources told NBC News.
The goal of a summit would be for the two leaders to announce progress towards a new nuclear arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, the people familiar with the discussions said.
One option under consideration is for the two leaders to sign a blueprint for a way forward in negotiations on extending New START, a nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia that expires next year, three of the people familiar with the discussions said.
They said Trump sees a summit as an opportunity to be presidential and demonstrate he’s able to negotiate agreements.
“He wants it to show his deal-maker abilities,” one of them said. “It’s just a big stage.”
A White House official said the president’s team plans to have him hold more meetings with world leaders in the weeks leading up to the election.
National security adviser Robert O’Brien said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Trump has not asked for a meeting with Putin in the U.S. but he hopes to host the Russian leader to sign a new arms control agreement.
“We’re not doing a meeting with Putin in the United States, but at some time we’d love to have Putin come here to sign a terrific arms control deal that protects Americans and protects Russians,” O’Brien said.
A Kremlin spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The State Department announced Friday that the U.S. special envoy for arms control, Marshall Billingslea, plans to meet with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov in Vienna on Monday in the next round of negotiations between the U.S. and Russia on an arms control agreement.
After a round of talks in June, Billingslea said the U.S. is “leaving all options on the table” about the future of the treaty, including extending it, but still emphasized the U.S. wants to bring China into a new agreement. Since then, the U.S. and Russia have failed to agree on some basic elements of an agreement, including even defining certain terms, during working level meetings to iron out the technical details, according to a defense official.
It became clear that a basic framework for negotiating the treaty, signed by Trump and Putin, would move the talks along, the official said.
Some of the president’s advisers have argued against a summit with Putin before the election, according to the people familiar with the discussions.
The aides are concerned that a summit with Putin would embolden the Russian leader at a time when Moscow is provoking the U.S., including interfering in the 2020 election and possibly offering money to militants in Afghanistan in exchange for killing American troops.
There are also concerns among administration officials that a summit could hurt the president politically because it would revive attacks from his opponents that he’s too cozy with Russia, the people familiar with the discussions said.
From their perspective, these people said, any potential upside of Trump striking an arms control deal is outweighed by the downside at a time when he’s already trailing in the polls.
Trump has held a handful of in-person meetings with Putin since taking office, including a 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland, that was widely seen as disastrous for the president.
Trump excluded his top aides from the meeting and said afterward that he believed Putin over U.S. intelligence officials on whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.