The announcements from the White House and the Kremlin hit inboxes at roughly the same time on Thursday: President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation will meet on July 16 in Helsinki, Finland.

Under previous U.S. presidents, the timing would not have deserved a second glance. But under Trump, whose administration is repeatedly beaten to the punch by Putin aides and the Kremlin on the release of critical information, it could presage a more buttoned-up approach by national security adviser John Bolton ahead of the high-stakes meeting.


A National Security Council official told POLITICO on Thursday that the countries had an agreement to simultaneously release the meeting announcements.

Yet there remains cause for concern, given that Russia is often first to share news with the world. Even tidbits around Bolton’s recent trip to negotiate the bilateral meeting mostly trickled out of the Kremlin before officials in the White House or the NSC could offer confirmation.

“The Trump administration hasn’t had a very good reputation for preparing for summits and high-level meetings,” said Leon Panetta, the former secretary of defense, CIA director and Clinton White House chief of staff. “I think they have to be very careful. It could send the wrong message to the world and to our allies.”

Russia has excelled at controlling the narrative.

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The month after Trump and Putin spoke in March, the Kremlin told reporters that it was during that conversation that Trump suggested the two should meet in Washington. Trump had told reporters after the phone call only that they discussed a possible meeting. The Russians’ revelation of a Washington meeting forced White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to acknowledge that “a number of potential venues, including the White House,” were discussed.

In May 2017, an official Russian photographer was allowed into the Oval Office to take pictures of Trump, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the ambassador at the time, Sergey Kislyak, seemingly joking around. The photos were released by TASS even though U.S. news media were barred from the event. The White House did not release its own photographs of the event.

And after his Kremlin meetings on Wednesday to finalize the summit, Bolton gave a news conference at Interfax, the Russian news agency, rather than at the U.S. Embassy, which struck some as unusual for an American official in Moscow.

The Kremlin was first to report Trump and Putin’s Dec. 17 call, and a review of statements from both countries found that Russia’s accounts are generally more specific.

“I just don’t understand it, frankly,” Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, told POLITICO. “It’s pretty elementary how one does this.”

When McFaul worked at the White House, he said, officials negotiated with their Russian counterparts on the simultaneous release of information.

“It’s just not that hard,” he said. “I really don’t understand why that doesn’t happen.”

The statement from Sanders on Thursday added only that the two leaders would discuss relations between the U.S. and Russia as well as a range of national security issues, leaving the format and much of the details of the meeting to be determined.

McFaul said he feared that Trump would continue to prioritize atmospherics — such as the chemistry he felt with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore earlier this month — over the specifics.

“If a friendly meeting leads to Russia withdrawing from Ukraine, I would applaud that,” McFaul said. “But that’s not what I predict. What I predict is that because Trump mixes up ends and means, he’s going to praise Putin like he did Kim Jong Un; he’s going to talk about him as a smart, tough guy, and that’s exactly the outcome that Putin wants.”

The challenge for Bolton is to develop a substantive agenda for the meeting that could be read out to say the U.S. made progress on concrete American national security and economic objectives, experts said.

That has not always happened, optically or otherwise.

Despite Trump’s warm words about Putin, to the consternation of U.S. allies, his administration has been made to feel the chill, including a bizarre episode in April 2017 where the Russian president kept former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson waiting for hours before finally agreeing to see him.

In one instance under former President Barack Obama when U.S. officials felt they didn’t have much substance ahead of time — and sensing that a meeting was moving in a negative direction — American officials canceled a two-day Moscow summit in September 2013.

Russia experts say it’s clear the country has been pushing for the summit by getting out ahead of the White House. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s announcement that Trump invited Putin to Washington, rather than a third neutral location, was the first indication of this dynamic, said Alina Polyakova, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution.

She said the Kremlin sees a potential opportunity to improve relations with the U.S. by holding the Trump-Putin meeting, something that Russia, which has become increasingly isolated from the West and hit by sanctions, wants and needs.

“But the Kremlin also has to be careful to not appear desperate or weak while at the same time not upsetting Trump by getting too far out of the U.S.,” Polyakova said. “It’s a delicate game that, so far, Moscow has played well.”

Even with the best circumstances, and under America’s best-laid plans, it’s impossible to predict how Trump will behave.

The meeting comes at a tenuous time, as he continues to insult some of America’s strongest allies while flattering its adversaries — relationships characterized by his nicknames: “Justin from Canada,” a dismissive name for Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, and “Chairman Kim,” Trump’s honorific for North Korea’s autocratic leader.

The president on Thursday also appeared to support Russia’s claims it had not interfered in the 2016 presidential election, even though U.S. intelligence agencies concluded it had.

“Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t Shady James Comey and the now disgraced FBI agents take and closely examine it? Why isn’t Hillary/Russia being looked at? So many questions, so much corruption!”

Trump’s remarks also appear to run counter to testimony of his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Wednesday that the president would warn Putin at the summit that it’s “completely unacceptable” to interfere in U.S. elections.

Putin, meantime, is unlikely to take a back seat and play to a script. Having spent years fighting against America’s portrayal of Russia as an adversary, he is now trying to demonstrate that the warmth projected by Trump, and by extension Russia’s influence in the world, is real.

“Putin will definitely try to secure statements from the president that he thinks are in Russia’s interest,” McFaul said. “And he will not be afraid to read them out to the press. In fact, he won’t be afraid to read them out with Trump sitting right there.”

“Be careful what you say, because Putin will pocket it. And he’ll tell the world that,” he warned. “It would be hard for President Trump to say, ‘That’s not what we agreed to.’”

