It usually takes months or years for U.S. presidents to prepare for a meeting with Russia's leader, but President Trump is apparently comfortable with just winging it. Kremlin experts warned The New Yorker that the White House has done practically nothing to prepare for the summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday: "I'm afraid our guy here is like an amateur boxer going up against Muhammad Ali," said one former State Department official.
Not even Trump is clear on what he and Putin are going to talk about at the summit in Helsinki, and foreign policy experts say there is little reason for the meeting to be happening with such haste. "There is no historical precedent that I know of for such a potentially high-stakes U.S.-Russia meeting to take place with so little advance preparation, and with such a dark cloud of suspicion and uncertainty hanging over it," said John Beyrle, who served as ambassador to Moscow under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. "We really are in uncharted waters here."
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