President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s high stakes summit on Aug. 15 will take place at a sprawling U.S. military base in Anchorage, Alaska, a White House official confirmed to USA TODAY.
The face-to-face meeting, billed as a “listening exercise” by the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, will be held at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, spread over 13,000 square acres, to discuss Russia’s three-year war on Ukraine.
“The goal of this meeting for the president is to walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war,” Leavitt told reporters during a news briefing on Aug. 12.
The meeting, which was announced last week, will be the first time in four years that a U.S. president has met Putin since the war began.
Putin and former President Joe Biden met only once during his presidency – in Geneva in June 2021.
