While the meeting is scheduled to last an hour, “many things will depend on the leaders themselves,” Ushakov said.

Trump and Putin last met in Helsinki in July 2018. That gathering was overshadowed by an uproar over Trump’s refusal to endorse his intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

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Trump canceled a planned follow-up meeting late last year in Argentina on short notice, frustrating Kremlin officials. The reason Trump gave was Russia’s capture of 24 Ukrainian sailors off the coast of Crimea. The sailors remain behind bars in Russia.

But with the conclusion this year of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference, there have been signs of a possible thaw in U.S.-Russian relations.

National security adviser John Bolton met with his Israeli and Russian counterparts in Jerusalem on Tuesday. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Putin at the Russian president's Black Sea summer home in May and assured him that Trump "wants to do everything we can" to improve ties.

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“There are places that our two countries can find where we can be cooperative, we can be productive, we can be accumulative, we can work together to make each of our two peoples more successful and frankly the world more successful, too,” Pompeo said at the time.

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But the intensity of U.S.-Russian tensions in global hot spots has only increased since then. Moscow and Washington are on opposing sides of the conflicts in Ukraine and Venezuela and on the intensifying standoff over Iran.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday criticized the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which is an ally of Moscow.