The meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Donald Trump at the upcoming G20 summit may create mutual trust, Russian political analyst Anatoly Petrenko said in an interview with Radio Sputnik.
Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov stated that Moscow will outline its program of stay in Hamburg to the United States at the G20 summit.
"We are coordinating the time. We will outline to the Americans the program of our stay in Hamburg, tell them which meetings we agreed on and try to enter an important meeting with Trump on the schedule," Ushakov told reporters when asked about preparations for the upcoming meeting between the Russian and US leaders in Hamburg.
Moscow expects that the meeting of the two leaders will bring clarity on the future of Russia-US relations, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday at the 2017 Primakov Readings, an international forum named after former foreign minister and prominent Russian diplomat Evgeny Primakov
"We [believe] that our president's meeting in Hamburg would clarify the prospects of the Russia-US ties," Lavrov said.
"The relationship between Russia and the United States on which the solution of many international issues depends — from ensuring strategic stability to solving regional crisis — is of utmost importance in today's world. We see that most countries are concerned about the present abnormal state of [Russo-American] relations which have become hostage to the internal political struggle in the United States," the Russian foreign minister stressed.
Speaking to Radio Sputnik, Russian political analyst Anatoly Petrenko emphasized the importance of the much-anticipated personal meeting between Putin and Trump.
"The meeting between Putin and Trump can become the key to the further development of relations between our countries," Petrenko said, adding, however, that it would be naïve to think that the first Putin-Trump meeting will solve all the current problems in US-Russian relations.
"I think that this meeting, first of all, can contribute to the formation of personal trust between the presidents. This is very important for bilateral relations. Both presidents are pragmatists. But the fact is that our interests coincide in many respects on a number of issues," Petrenko pointed out.
The first ever Putin-Trump meeting has caught the headlines in recent weeks, although the Kremlin and the White House only confirmed it would take place on Thursday and Friday next week.
