(The Hill/NEXSTAR) – President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putins shook hands in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday afternoon, greeting each other warmly in what was their first face-to-face interaction since the first Trump administration.
The two leaders met on the tarmac at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, smiling before the assembled media before getting into “the Beast,” sitting side-by-side in the back seat en route to the meeting site.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the previously planned one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin is now a three-on-three meeting that will include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Putin will be joined by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov. The change indicates that the White House is taking a more guarded approach than it did during a 2018 meeting in Helsinki, when Trump and Putin first met privately just with their interpreters for two hours.
Ahead of departure, Trump posted “HIGH STAKES!!!” on his Truth Social platform. Russia seemed to agree, as Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted Trump on the social platform X and commented, “True.”
Putin and Trump are expected to hold a joint press conference at the end of the summit.
Trump said earlier Friday that he would not use the meeting as a platform to negotiate for Ukraine and threatened to “walk away” from the conversation if Putin is not willing to make a peace deal that the U.S. finds acceptable.
“I think it’s going to work out very well — and if it doesn’t, I’m going to head back home real fast,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier aboard Air Force One.
The comments come days after the president sought to reassure European allies that he would not advocate for a land swap between Russia and Ukraine.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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