Trump aide says president-elect won't meet Putin on first intl. trip
US President-elect Donald Trump won’t be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on his first international trip after being sworn in, says a top aide.
Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, said Saturday that Trump had no plans to meet the Russian head of state and media reports about such a meeting were “100 percent false.”
British newspaper, The Sunday Times, reported Saturday that Trump was planning to hold a summit with Putin within weeks of his inauguration on January 20.
The report even claimed that Trump had chosen Iceland’s Reykjavik for the meeting in order to emulate former US President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War deal-making with former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Trump was going to discuss nuclear disarmament with Putin but did not want to meet him in Russia, the Times added.
“Not true- 100 percent false,” Spicer said in a tweet.
Trump has said on many occasions that he would push for warmer relations with Moscow once he replaces President Barack Obama.
He indicated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday that he might even remove Washington’s sanctions against Moscow and consider a meeting with his Russian counterpart.
“If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?” he said, noting he would keep the sanctions imposed by Obama in place “at least for a period of time.”
“I understand that they would like to meet, and that’s absolutely fine with me,” he added.
Last month, the Obama administration announced a series of economic sanctions against Russia and expelled 35 Russian diplomats over allegations that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election through cyber attacks.
Earlier this week, the outgoing administration imposed sanctions on five prominent Russians over what the US Treasury Department called human rights abuses.
Washington and its allies had already levied broad economic sanctions against the Kremlin and blacklisted dozens of its citizens over Russia’s alleged involvement in the Ukraine conflict.
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