U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton On Tour Of Caspian Region

U.S. President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton arrived in Russia, where he will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on a trip that will also take him to Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

During his two days in Russia, Bolton is also expected to meet with Nikolai Patrushev, the Russian security council secretary, and possibly President Vladimir Putin. Bolton announced the trip Friday in a tweet.

"On October 20th I'll be traveling to Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia to meet with my counterparts and other senior officials to advance American interests on a range of security issues," Bolton wrote on his Twitter official page. The trip is widely expected to lay the groundwork for a second summit between Trump and Putin, who last met in Helsinki in July.

In September 2017, in response to the reduction in American diplomatic staff in Russia that summer for the imposition of sanctions, the Trump administration ordered the seizure of three Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States, namely the Russian consulate in San Francisco, the trade mission in Washington, D.C. and a consular annex in New York.

According to Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, the Russian side may raise the issue of recovery of Russian diplomatic property in the U.S. during Bolton’s visit to the Kremlin.

"As for the range of problems discussed, whether the issue of Russian real estate is included there, we do not remove this topic from the agenda in contacts with our American colleagues at all levels regularly," Zakharova said, according to RIA Novosti.

Relations between the two nuclear armed nations have been in a downward spiral for several years due to Russia’s military intervention in Syria, its behavior in Ukraine and annexation of the Crimean peninsula, as well as accusations by Washington that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

There is speculation that the Trump administration plans to inform Russian leaders in the coming days that it is preparing to leave the three-decade-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, for which Bolton has personally pushed. Signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan, Washington is accusing Russia of violating it by deploying tactical nuclear weapons to intimidate former Soviet satellite states that are now close to the West.