Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closely-watched Friday meeting with President Trump in Alaska on Friday was the former’s first visit to the United States in a decade. Putin’s last visit was in Sept 2015, for the UN General Assembly in New York. At the gathering, he faced off with President Barack Obama, with dueling speeches in the morning and a tense meeting at night.Putin’s address to the assembly was a defiant one in which he defended backing the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and dismissed Western condemnation of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.Obama delivered a forceful warning against the perils of leaving Assad in power and allowing Ukraine’s sovereignty to be violated.That evening, the two leaders shared a terse handshake before entering a Security Council consultation room for a private meeting.Relations between the two had been so fraught in the preceding days that neither side would even admit to having sought the meeting in the first place, and it appeared to conclude with few resolutions.Before the UN meeting, Putin’s last visit to the US was far more relaxed. In the summer of 2007, President George W Bush invited him to the Bush family’s coastal compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. The two men took a “full blast” speedboat ride with former President George Bush – a journey that Putin “loved” and his interpreter appeared to find “nerve-wracking,” Bush later recounted.The visit was an attempt to smooth over some of the differences between the Russian and American leaders, including over Iran’s nuclear program and American plans for a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. “We had a good, casual discussion,” Bush said. The two former American presidents also took the Russian leader fishing, with Putin reeling in the only catch of the day. NYT
