The stage is set in Hamburg for the first face to face meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The two men are expected to meet for just half an hour on the fringes of the G20 summit.
It is a meeting fraught with risk for President Trump, who remains dogged by investigations into any ties that may have existed between his election campaign last year and the Russian government.
Our Washington Correspondent Simon Marks reports.
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It has taken nearly 5 months but the men with now arguable claims to be the two most powerful leaders in the world will finally sit down today in Hamburg.
President Donald Trump at last facing President Vladimir Putin….getting the chance finally to establish a relationship that some suspect has existed for a while….a relationship that - sometimes - President Trump has denied.
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And that isn't where the inconsistencies end.
President Trump in Warsaw before traveling to the G20 summit in Germany sounded - in a speech - pretty down on Russia.
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But he struck a completely different tone in an ad libbed press conference where the admirable Hallie Jackson of NBC News attempted one more time to pin the President down on whether he agrees with the conclusion of the US intelligence community: that Russia did try to swing the outcome of last year's US election.
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Extraordinarily it's reported there will be only 6 people in the room: the two Presidents, the American secretary of state Rex Tillerson who - as an oil man - was given one of Russia's top honors, the Order of Friendship, by Mr. Putin.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will be there - last time he met President Trump, the US leader gave him some classified intelligence that he wasn't supposed to share.
And there will two translators in the room….but no National Security officials, the men and women of the Trump administration with real expertise on Russia.
That has horrified Washington's foreign policy elites: men like Stephen Sestanovich, who served in the Reagan administration, fear Vladimir Putin is more canny, better prepared, and a better tactician than his American opposite number.
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It was reported this week that President Trump's national security staff have been preparing him for the meeting with what are described as Tweet-length bullet points.
Hard to get much nuance in there about things like Russian support for Bashar al Assad in Damascus….or the annexation of Ukraine about which Mr. Trump said virtually nothing in Poland.
And will President Trump issue any kind of warning to the Russians to lay off interference in overseas elections including America's?
Under any other American President it would item one on the agenda: but under this one, it might not be raised at all.
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