The Kremlin is expecting a “long and thorough meeting” between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Buenos Aires summit later this month, Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said Friday, according to Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti.
Ushakov made the remark in response to a question about future meetings between Trump and Putin.
Before their tête-à-tête at the summit in Argentina, the two leaders are slated to meet on the sidelines of the 100th anniversary of the World War I armistice on November 11 in Paris, Ushakov said.
The US National Security Council told CNN that it had no announcement at this time.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has previously said that Putin expected to discuss Trump’s plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty during their bilateral meeting in Paris.
Trump announced last month that the US would pull out of the decades-old agreement, citing Russia’s likely violations of the treaty and China’s missile arsenal as reasons for ditching the accord.
The signing of the treaty in 1987 was seen as a watershed moment during the end days of the Cold War, helping to eliminate thousands of land-based missiles with ranges between approximately 300 and 3,400 miles.
In 2014, CNN reported that the US had accused Russia of violating the INF Treaty, citing cruise missile tests that dated to 2008. The US informed its NATO allies at the time of Russia’s suspected breach.
However, it wasn’t until recently that NATO officially confirmed that Russia’s activity constituted a likely violation.
Trump has met his Russian counterpart at least three times since taking office, formally at the G20 in Hamburg in 2017 and in Helsinki this summer, as well as informally at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam last November.
In July, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that they hoped to welcome Putin to Washington for a summit this fall. But the administration scrapped that plan just days later.