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Explainer
'Putin will have Trump for breakfast': How summit may backfire
The agenda is loose but the stakes are high. Here’s how the experts think the Monday meeting will play out.
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Updated
By Kelsey Munro
Image: A composite photo shows US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (AAP)
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin meets with US President Donald Trump in Finland’s capital Helsinki on Monday (about 8pm AEST).
The pair have met twice before, but this will be the first time they sit down in a formal, one-on-one meeting, at a time of deteriorating US-Russia relations.
The meeting is expected to last about three hours including a press conference afterwards, according to the official schedule published on Saturday. For an hour and a half, the two leaders will be alone with interpreters.
Mr Trump personally pushed for the summit against advice from his own advisers and Russian experts in the US, according to The New Yorker and other major US media outlets.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017. Source: Getty Images
That might be why, in a weekend interview in Scotland, Mr Trump was already downplaying expectations for the summit. “I don’t expect anything… I go in with very low expectations,” he told CBS News.
What’s on the agenda?
If this was a more conventional summit – or a more conventional US leader involved – there would be a detailed agenda and terms of engagement set out.
There is certainly plenty to talk about, from Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections (to Mr Trump’s benefit); Russia’s support of armed separatists in Eastern Ukraine and its annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea; the sanctions imposed as a result; both powers’ roles in the conflict in Syria; the downing of MH17 by Russian-backed forces four years ago this week; Iran, nuclear proliferation and arms control; counter-terrorism and the US joint hosting of the World Cup in 2026 following Russia’s turn this month.
But there is nothing conventional about this meeting, and the US leader’s objectives are not clear.
“No one really knows what’s on the agenda,” said ANU Associate Professor Matthew Sussex, a Russian foreign and security policy expert.
“This is the twilight zone, as far as diplomacy goes. I can’t imagine an era in recent memory where you would have a leader going into a meeting without some form of representation,” he told SBS News.
“Putin will have him for breakfast.”
Putin will have him for breakfast. - Matthew Sussex, ANU
Most commentators believe Mr Putin, a former KGB colonel and highly experienced autocratic leader, goes into the meeting with a slew of advantages, both innate and circumstantial. With Russia currently facing heavy sanctions and exile from the G7 (it was expelled in 2014 from the former G8 group of “rich nations” for its annexing Crimea), just having the meeting with Mr Trump is a win for Mr Putin.
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“Putin comes into this meeting from a position of strength,” strategic studies expert Associate Professor Alexey Muraviev from Curtin University told SBS News.
“It is Trump who has to justify to Congress and critics at home why he pressed ahead to meet with Putin despite advice he got not to. If nothing is achieved during this meeting he will come under serious fire at home.”
The meeting comes after a disorienting Mr Trump visit to Europe last week where he berated NATO allies and listed the EU first among US “foes”, in sentiments that echo Mr Putin’s own foreign policy interests in a divided West.
What does Trump want?
Some speculate that Mr Trump would like to repeat the sort of he pulled off with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in April.
But Mr Trump has often spoken highly of Mr Putin personally, as well as the need for better US-Russian relations, even while an ongoing US special investigation probing Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election saw handed down last week.
“They should let Russia come back in, because we should have Russia at the negotiating table,” Mr Trump told reporters on the way to the G7 meeting in Quebec in June. “It may not be politically correct, but we have a world to run.”
Broadly speaking, Mr Trump has a point that better US-Russia relations would be a positive, Professor Sussex said, in part because Western sanctions have only pushed Russia closer to China.
Supporters of Donald Trump welcomed the US President to Finland. Source: AAP
“The logic is that we don’t want to recreate a bipolar world with a Sino-Russian bloc up against a more fragmented western bloc,” he said. “Unfortunately… it seems like he’d like to cause as much division as possible within the EU and traditional allies.”
Professor Muraviev said Mr Trump would be compelled to discuss the indictment of the 12 Russian intelligence officials with Mr Putin at the summit, an idea which Mr Trump said he hadn’t thought of until a journalist put it to him on the weekend.
There is no extradition treaty between the two nations so it is extremely unlikely they would ever face a US court.
But on the touchy subject of election interference, Professor Muraviev predicted there may be some sort of agreement.
“I feel confident they could come to the conclusion that Putin says Russia never interfered and Trump would happily agree he did not get any Russian assistance. This is where you can almost guarantee they will have a statement,” Professor Muraviev said.
What does Putin want?
Mr Putin wants recognition of Russian sovereignty in Crimea; an agreement to start dialling down sanctions; and perhaps some sort of agreement on non-interference in each other’s domestic affairs, says Professor Sussex.
“Unfortunately Trump is likely to see that [non-interference agreement] as a win, an announceable, but it has everything to do with Russian interests, not US interests,” he said. 
Professor Muraviev says Mr Putin would want to discuss Syria and Iran and might be prepared for the US to “manage” Iran in exchange for the US “giving up” on Syria and abandoning support for the Syrian opposition.
Finns have protested in Helsinki against the summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Source: Supplied
He said Mr Putin would also want to discuss the Russian nationals doing jail time in the US and the return of Russian diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland that were seized by the Obama administration in December 2016 in retaliation for election meddling.
Could there be a breakthrough?
Professor Muraviev points out that the location of the summit is laden with symbolism. It was the site of the 1975 Helsinki Accords between the US and the Soviet Union and 33 other countries “which effectively configured the new world order by recognising the existence of the two superpowers.”
He said that the choice of location may speak to the two leaders’ intention to attempt a breakthrough in relations, however unlikely.
But Professor Sussex is sceptical. He points out that Mr Trump is the fourth US president to meet Mr Putin in the past two decades, with little lasting progress to show for those previous summits.
“American-Russian diplomacy has been a tale of reset after reset after reset and sometimes frankly the US has been at fault in that,” he says. “No one can read Trump’s mind and it’s kind of foolish to try.”
