MOSCOW, August 12. /TASS/. Russia hopes the Trump-Putin Alaska summit sparks bilateral progress; Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu announces a wider military offensive to "finish the job" against Hamas in Gaza; and Russia mulls a strategic gas route through Serbia to Hungary and beyond amid a transit halt by Ukraine. These stories topped Tuesday's newspaper headlines across Russia.
Russia hopes that the upcoming meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US leader Donald Trump in Alaska on August 15 will give a new impetus to bilateral relations and help resolve a number of key issues, including reopening flights between the two countries, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told Izvestia. On August 11, the US president, too, said trade relations between Russia and the United States could be normalized. He also said that his talks with Putin will likely be preliminary and that a Russia-Ukraine summit will take place some time in the future. At that, Kiev will have to swap some land for peace. Experts interviewed by Izvestia agree that territorial concessions from Ukraine are inevitable and that any refusal to do so will be highly deleterious for Ukrainian troops. The European Union convened an emergency foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday saying that any Ukraine peace deal made without the participation of Kiev and Brussels would be inadmissible.
