PARIS — With US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin set to meet next Friday in Alaska against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, we look back at previous historic encounters between the two nuclear powers.
1959: Eisenhower and Khrushchev
Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev met at Camp David in September 1959 in what was the first visit by a Soviet leader to the United States.
In Hollywood, Khrushchev delivered one of his legendary rants to an audience that included Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.
The summit concluded with a statement that the two superpowers work towards talks on disarmament and on the status of Berlin, which the Cold War had divided.
1961: Kennedy and Khrushchev
President John F. Kennedy met with Khrushchev in June 1961 at the former imperial Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna.
The summit was an icy encounter befitting the Cold War era, made chillier by the failed US Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that happened shortly before. Berlin was top of the agenda, but two months later, the wall dividing the city would be built.
A year later, the Cuban missiles crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
1972: Nixon and Brezhnev
The Vietnam War cast a long shadow over the Moscow summit in May 1972 between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev.
But the summit would prove key in ushering in the period of detente between the two superpowers as they signed the SALT and ABM weapons-control treaties.
In a joint declaration, they said peaceful coexistence was the only basis for mutual relations in a nuclear age.
The two men met twice more while they were in power, underlining the thaw in ties. But relations would later chill again with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
1986: Reagan and Gorbachev
In four years, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had four summits.
Their first encounter took place in Geneva in November 1985 where Reagan, still berating the “evil empire”, suggested he and Gorbachev go for a walk “to get some fresh air” by Lake Geneva.
When they returned, the talk was of “chemistry”. Reagan found Gorbachev “very comfortable, very easy to be with”.
At the third of four summits in December 1987, both powers agreed a treaty to eliminate their short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
