Trump Wants to Hold Summit With Putin in Iceland: Sunday Times

EghtesadOnline: Donald Trump’s advisers have told U.K. officials that the incoming president’s first foreign trip will be a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, potentially in Reykjavik within weeks of taking office, the Sunday Times reported.

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15 January 2017

Trump plans to begin working on a deal to limit nuclear weapons, the newspaper said, without providing details. It cited an unidentified source for the summit plans, and added that Moscow is ready to agree to the meeting, based on comments from officials at the Russian embassy in London, according to Bloomberg.

The paper, citing an unidentified adviser to Trump, told the Times that the president-elect, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, will meet with Putin at a neutral venue “very soon.”

In eyeing Iceland’s capital, Trump’s team may be hoping to recreate the optics of a Reagan-era nuclear agreement. Former President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, held a two-day summit in Reykjavik in October 1986 to work on what eventually became a major nuclear disarmament treaty between the two superpowers in 1987.

Trump’s transition team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson traveled to Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 8, where he met with Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and the president-elect’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.