President Donald Trump’s decision to meet with Vladimir Putin this week when the two leaders are expected to be in Vietnam divided his aides, some of whom questioned the wisdom of such an encounter amid the FBI’s ongoing Russia probe and a steady stream of reports about Moscow’s manipulation of social media for propaganda purposes.



The meeting is set for the sidelines of an Asian economic summit in Da Nang, near the end of Trump’s marathon 13-day tour of Asia, the president told reporters on Air Force One.

Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson both view the meeting as worth the cost of the awkward optics, US officials told BuzzFeed News, but career diplomats inside the administration have come down on different sides.

Some White House officials also view the optics of the meeting with trepidation, and one aide discharged a series of expletives last month when this reporter told him that the Russians had made public the possibility of a meeting. “Moscow pulls this shit every time even though we haven’t agreed to shit. It’s outrageous,” the White House official fumed.

“There are people on the inside who don’t see any value in meeting with Putin,” said John Herbst, a Russia expert at the Atlantic Council. “But the president’s advisers recognize his inclinations and realize they need to take them into account, so they’ve talked about being able to do things with Russia provided that Russia does things first.”

The concern among the government’s Russia experts is that there is little to gain from the meeting, particularly on the issue of Syria, where the US and Russia are backing opposing sides in a conflict that began as an uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad. Putin, these experts believe, isn’t serious about pressuring Assad into a political settlement so there is little to gain from a meeting.

“They think, as they did throughout 2016, that Russia is Lucy, the US is Charlie Brown, and Syria is the football,” one individual familiar with the deliberations told BuzzFeed News.

Tillerson, meanwhile, believes that the US can’t make progress on a deescalation and political solution in Syria without Russian cooperation, two US officials said. But he wants the US side to be prepared for a substantive discussion on other issues, including Ukraine and North Korea.

Tillerson’s position is generally supported by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and in particular by Special Envoy Brett McGurk, who leads the anti-ISIS effort. Senior Middle East officials David Satterfield and Michael Ratney are also said to be supportive of the effort.

A senior State Department official, who was sympathetic to both arguments, said the Russians are necessary to restore the momentum behind the “Geneva process,” the UN-based format the West views as the best way to begin a political transition in Syria away from Assad. An alternative process, sponsored by Russia, Turkey, and Iran, has emerged in talks held in Astana, Kazakhstan. The US has attended the talks as a participant, but Russia is clearly the more influential presence.