HELSUNKI, July 12. /TASS/. Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto has discussed the upcoming Russian-US summit in Helsinki with his US counterpart Donald Trump, the Finnish Ilta-Sanomat newspaper reported on Thursday.

According to the newspaper, a brief conversation between Niinisto and Trump took place during a working dinner in Brussels where the Finnish president had arrived for the NATO summit.

Ilta-Sanomat said that Niinisto had declined to comment on his conversation with the US president. However, he said that he was more optimistic than before about the upcoming Helsinki summit.

"The reason is that more than twenty speeches were delivered at the dinner with no statements made against the importance of transatlantic cooperation - nothing that could ruin NATO," the newspaper quoted Niinisto as saying. "As for the Helsinki meeting, everyone who mentioned it pointed out that it was a good and necessary thing. On the other hand, many had thoughts about ways to conduct it. But that is another matter," the Finnish president added.

The Kremlin press service said earlier that Putin and Trump would hold a meeting in Helsinki on July 16. According to Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the two leaders are expected to discuss a number of difficult issues, including the Syrian conflict.