MOSCOW: The Kremlin hopes next week’s US-Russia summit in Helsinki may pave the way for US Presi­dent Donald Trump to visit Moscow and for President Vladimir Putin to make an official visit to Washington, it said on Friday.

Neither side expects the one-day summit on Monday, the first between the two leaders, to yield major policy breakthroughs given the battered state of US-Russia relations, which are languishing at their lowest ebb since the Cold War.

But the Kremlin, which has long pushed for such a meeting, hopes it will be the beginning of a thaw that will allow ties to be gradually rebuilt and for the two to cooperate pragmatically in areas where they have common interests.

“You never know but let’s see, perhaps there will be a conversation about concrete visits to Moscow or to Washington,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters on Friday, calling the summit “the main event of the summer”.

“We want there to be a possibility that these talks create an atmosphere that would allow us to discuss future contacts and, in particular, normal contacts in the form of visits to our res­pective countries.”

Ushakov said the summit, which will be held in Finland’s presidential palace in central Helsinki, would begin with the two leaders holding one-to-one talks with only interpreters present.

Negotiations would then be widened to include members of both delegations, he said, adding that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will hold parallel talks in Helsinki with his US counterpart, Mike Pompeo.

Trump: ‘tougher on Russia than anybody’

US President Donald Trump on Friday said he had been “tougher on Rus­sia than anybody”, ahead of a summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Monday. “We have been far tougher on Russia than anybod... We have been extremely tough on Russia,” he said at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

He recalled that 60 intelligence officers were expelled from the Russian embassy in Washington in response to a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain.

“We have been very strong on Russia,” Trump told reporters at the British premier’s Chequers country residence, after talks with May.

“I’m not going in with high expectations but we may come out with very surprising things,” Trump said. The president said he wanted to develop a relationship with Putin, which he said would be “good for Russia, good for everybody”.

Trump claimed he would be going into the meeting with Putin with Nato better financed, more united and resolute.

The US president said he would be discussing Syria, the Middle East, Ukraine and nuclear proliferation. “That would be a tremendous achievement if we could do something on nuclear proliferation,” he said.

Published in Dawn, July 14th, 2018