As part of an effort to lay the ground for a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, US National Security Adviser John Bolton held talks in Moscow on Wednesday with Russian officials ahead of a meeting with the Russian president.
Bolton, a lifelong hawk who warned last year before his own appointment that Washington negotiated with Putin’s Russia at its peril, was due to give a news conference later in the day, where he might name the date and location of a summit, Reuters reported.
TASS news agency reported that Bolton had discussed potential cooperation between the two countries’ security councils with Yuri Averyanov, the first deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council.
Bolton began talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ahead of his planned sit-down with Putin.
Trump congratulated Putin by phone in March after the Russian leader’s landslide reelection victory and said the two would meet soon. However, the Russians have since complained about the difficulty of setting up a meeting.
Relations between Washington and Moscow are languishing at a post-Cold War low. Expectations for the outcome of any Putin-Trump summit are therefore low, even though Trump said before he was elected that he wanted to improve battered US-Russia ties.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Putin and Bolton would discuss what it described as “the sad state” of US-Russia relations.
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