NEWSLINK: “PUTIN AND TRUMP ESTABLISH BILATERAL CHANNEL TO MOVE FORWARD” – Richard Sakwa/ Valdai

“The first face-to-face meeting of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump finally took place on 7 July 2017 at the G20 summit in Hamburg. Not since the days of superpower summits during the Cold War has a meeting been more eagerly anticipated, or so assiduously impeded by its opponents. In the context where normal practices of diplomacy have so far degenerated, and where ‘megaphone diplomacy’ (to use the term employed to describe relations at one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War in the early 1980s) has taken its place, a personal meeting was important for a whole number of reasons. …”