Just Sitting Down With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead

But, he added, “Putin versus Trump is not an equal contest” because of the Russian leader’s vastly superior knowledge of policy detail, his mastery of geopolitics and his past as a KGB officer schooled in the arts of persuasion, flattery and subterfuge.

“If he can get Trump to come out and say the sort of things he said after meeting with Kim Jong-un, that is a big win for Putin.” Mr. Bond said. “If he can get him to say that all the problems between Russia and America have been cooked up by the Ukrainians and America’s deep state, or anything that leads in that direction, it will be a success for Putin,” he added.

Mr. Bond predicted that Mr. Putin, well aware of what buttons to push with Mr. Trump, would urge the American leader to halt the United States’ participation in Trident Juncture, one of NATO’s largest military exercises since the end of the Cold War, which the Kremlin sees as a provocation.

The possibility that Mr. Putin, after months of frustration at Mr. Trump’s inability to deliver on his repeated pledges to “get along with Russia,” will have something to celebrate in Helsinki has led to an abrupt dialing down of the often venomous anti-American diatribes by Russia’s state-controlled news outlets.

Aleksei A. Venediktov, the editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy, a Moscow radio station that has been allowed to maintain an independent editorial line, said that in eagerness to avoid offending Mr. Trump, the state news media, under orders from the Kremlin, had muted its frequent portrayal of the American president as a hapless captive of the “deep state,” the supposed cabal of hidden power-brokers that the Kremlin has long blamed for all its problems with the United States.

Presenting Mr. Trump as a helpless prisoner of more powerful forces runs counter to the American leader’s macho self-image, Mr. Venediktov said, so it had to be toned down to allow Mr. Trump to “display his manly qualities in Helsinki.”

But no matter how well Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin may bond over their shared approach to leadership, few expect them to produce many concrete results beyond a vaguely worded statement pledging to work together and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.