Trump and Putin: fighting on neutral ground – Politics

• Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet at the summit of Helsinki in a very short time
• Since the announcement of the meeting, diplomats and observers are writing a wish list which both men have urgently need to talk.
• The Kremlin According to him, "global and regional security issues" should be at the top of the list of issues to be addressed.

There is already an agreement on at least one point before Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet for the first time on Monday. Relations between the United States and Russia are as bad as they have been since the Cold War. Diplomats are deported, agencies closed, sanctions imposed, allegations of espionage and threats made. Even the Cuban missile crisis is now used as a comparison; At that time, in 1962, the world was on the brink of nuclear war.

Now, the spirit of Helsinki is to help. In neutral Finland, Western and Soviet diplomats were once able to negotiate to scare the balance of terror. Since then, however, the balance has been lost. That this happened with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that Putin has known as a "geopolitical catastrophe", with the enlargement of NATO to the East or only with the l '39; annexation of Crimea, each party has its own explanations. One thing is certain: with insecurity comes fear.

"Nobody wanted to listen to us, now you will listen!"

Trump security advisor John Bolton in Moscow announced in late June that presidents would meet, diplomats and observers write a wish list, which both men urgently need to talk about. What about after the release of Trump from the agreement with Iran? How to continue with North Korea and Eastern Ukraine? And Trump would like Putin to make a statement that relieves him at home in the Russian business, US media reported, citing a draft program that the Americans would have sent to the Kremlin. However, we do not know how it could look like. Putin said from the beginning that Russia was not interfering in the US election campaign. The charges brought by Special Investigator Robert Mueller against 12 members of the Russian secret service for attacks on the Democratic Party's computer networks and Hillary Clinton's staff do not facilitate the approach.

According to the Kremlin, "global and regional security issues" be high on the list of topics to be covered. In April, the world held its breath when Trump fired cruise missiles Tomahawk in Syria in retaliation for a toxic gas mission by the Assad regime. A blow to a Russian position, a killed Russian military adviser would have brought the two nuclear powers to the brink of war.

A horror scenario that Vladimir Putin has evoked again and again lately. In an interview he spoke with an ironic smile of the destruction of the world in response to a hypothetical nuclear attack by the Americans: "Why do we need a world without Russia?" In his speech to the nation in early March, he congratulated for more than 40 minutes the latest developments in the Russian defense industry, stealing nuclear reactors that could break any US defense shield . Basic message: "Nobody wanted to listen to us, now you will listen to us!"

Two key global security conventions threaten to lose their effect in the near future. The new Strategic Nuclear Weapons Treaty expires in 2021. It limits the number of nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side and the number of launchers to 800. Because Moscow's leaders knew that Russia would be even less capable of doing so. In the face of an arms race that the Soviet Union at the time, it was preparing for the launch Contract, says Ulrich Kühn, expert at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. Putin would have addressed this issue in his first phone conversation with Trump

Former Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev had signed the New Start Treaty 2010. It can be extended once beyond 2021 for another five years. But after Trump has dissolved a string of Obama contracts as a "bad deal," including the recent nuclear deal with Iran, one must expect that he will do with New Start, Kühn fears. "But to negotiate a new contract, the time is extremely short."

The United States accuses the Russians of making new medium-range missiles

Endangered is also the INF Treaty, in which America and the Soviet Union in 1988 accepted to destroy their land-based nuclear weapons from 500 to 5500 kilometers and to dismantle the launchers. The Pershing missiles SS-20 and had terrified Europeans in the 1980s because Europe would have been their first target in a superpower confrontation.