Finland Ready to Host Putin-Trump Meeting

Finland is ready to organize a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the new US President Donald Trump, Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila said on Monday.

Earlier in the day, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Moscow expects that the date of a possible phone conversation between Trump and Putin would be agreed soon, Sputnik reported.

“We are ready to organize this meeting at the Arctic Council summit, if the political situation is conducive to it,” Sipila said, noting however that there have been no specific signals of a possible summit.

“Moscow has been closely following the situation in the US and has already realized that many of Trump’s foreign policy priorities are in line with Russia’s position,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after meeting with his Hungarian counterpart Peter Szijjarto, TASS news agency reported.

“We have been following the situation in the US. We can see that many of the major foreign policy issues that Donald Trump has mentioned overlap with what President Putin has been saying about Russia’s foreign policy priorities.”

The top Russian diplomat stressed that the fight against the self-styled Islamic State terrorist group was announced as a major priority of the new US administration.

“The fight is planned to be carried out until this terror group is completely destroyed, which is in the interests of Russia, the US and many other countries, including Hungary,” he said.

“We are fully prepared to take into account the ways to combat terror that the Trump administration will outline.”

Lavrov said Russia is ready to take into account Trump’s anti-terrorism course.

“Russia is ready to mend ties with US based on the search for balance of interests,” he said.

“We don’t get too excited, but we will be ready to go our own part of the way so that relations with the US normalize. This is possible only based on equality, respect for each other and search for balance of interests where we have common goals such as war on terror.”