President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are slated to meet for a highly anticipated one-on-one in Alaska on Friday, Aug. 15 in a rare bilateral meeting on American soil at a time of heightened tensions.
Putin will be the first elected Russian leader to visit Alaska for the summit, land that the United States purchased from Moscow for $7.2 million in 1867, according to the National Archives.
If everything goes according to plan, this trip will mark Putin’s eighth visit to the U.S. during his presidency, a role he has held for 20 years across two separate terms. Trump is hosting the meeting to try to push Moscow into a peace deal with Ukraine. The war, sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, nears the 3 1/2-year mark and stands as the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.
More: Trump-Putin summit spotlights Alaska’s strategic importance, vulnerability
The leaders of the U.S. and Russia have met many times over the decades since the USSR dissolved, charting ups and downs in a complex relationship between the two nations, which has swung from periods of deep tension and distrust, to times of détente and cooperation.
Putin’s meetings with U.S. presidents: Dozens of talks with Bush, Clinton
Since taking office in 1999, and again in 2012 after a brief four-year interlude when ally Dmitry Medvedev held the job, Putin has met with every U.S. president, according to U.S. State Department archives. In total, Putin has held dozens of official and unofficial meetings with American presidents over the years.
Some presidents had more frequent interactions with the Russian leader than others.
Although former President Bill Clinton’s second term in office only briefly overlapped with Putin’s initial tenure, the pair met several times in 2000 and had previously met when Putin was vice president under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Clinton delivered an address in the Russian State Duma in June 2000, recounting the more than half dozen times he visited the country, twice before he became president and five times while in office. Clinton developed a particularly close relationship with Yeltsin, the country’s first democratically elected leader after the fall of the Soviet Union.
President George W. Bush met with Putin at least a dozen times over his two terms, including a 2007 trip to the family home in Maine.
As tensions ratcheted up, Putin’s meetings with U.S. presidents dropped
Since Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, the relationship between Putin and the West has been increasingly strained, and the longtime Russian leader has met less frequently with U.S. presidents in the years since.
An American president has not traveled to Russia for an official state visit for more than a decade.
Former President Barack Obama’s September 2013 trip to St. Petersburg is the last such visit, which initially included a stop in Moscow to meet with Putin. Obama cancelled the one-on-one roughly a month prior, citing a lack of progress on talks surrounding arms control, trade, security and human rights, as well as Russia’s decision at the time to grant temporary asylum to American whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Putin attended the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, where he held talks with Obama, who sharply criticized Putin over the conflict in eastern Ukraine and Syria.
Former President Joe Biden met with the Russian president just once in his term, in Geneva in June 2021.
During Trump’s first term, he held one bilateral meeting with Putin in Finland in July 2018. In a press conference after the closed-door talk, Trump appeared to publicly reject U.S. intelligence community findings of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and to accept Putin’s denial of the interference. The pair have met briefly and informally several times since, such as on the sidelines of global leader summits, and have held several disclosed phone conversations.
The Aug. 15 meeting will be the first in-person session between the two world leaders since Trump returned to the White House in January.
Contributing: Reuters.
Kathryn Palmer is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at kapalmer@usatoday.com and on X @KathrynPlmr.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How many times has Putin met with US presidents
