WASGHINGTON, November 5. /TASS/. US President Donald Trump told reporters on his way to Japan on Saturday that he expected to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his Asian tour.
"I think it’s expected we’ll meet with Putin," he said. "We want Putin’s help on North Korea, and we’ll be meeting with a lot of different leaders."
In a conversation with journalists, the US leader described the North Korean crisis as "a big problem" for his country and the entire world.
"We want to get it solved. It’s a big problem for our country and for the world, and we want to get it solved. And there’s been 25 years of total weakness, and so we’re taking a very much different approach," he said.
Trump said in a Fox News interview on Thursday that a meeting with Putin was possible on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Vietnam. "Putin is very important because they can help us with North Korea," the US leader said, adding that he also wanted to discuss Syria and Ukraine with his Russian counterpart.
Commenting on the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, said the meeting is "indeed being agreed."
Trump will visit Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines between November 5 and November 14. It will be his first official visit to Asia. As part of the tour, Trump will bisit the November 10 summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Vietnam and the November 12-13 summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Manila, Philippines.
The first Trump-Putin meeting in person was held on July 7 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Germany’s Hamburg. It lasted two hours 15 minutes instead of 30 minutes as was originally planned.