BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany will host President Vladimir Putin of Russia for talks near Berlin this weekend, a surprise move that analysts said shows how foes and allies of the United States alike are shifting in response to the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs and unpredictable diplomacy.

The chancellor and the Russian president will meet Saturday at the German government’s version of Camp David, Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters Monday.

He said the talks were expected to focus on the situation in Syria, violence in eastern Ukraine, and a joint pipeline for natural gas.

But analysts said that beyond the detailed points of the meeting might be an attempt to strengthen alliances and exchange ideas about how best to respond to President Trump’s tariffs.

Both Russia and Germany have been hit by tariffs on aluminum and steel, and both fear the ripple effects of Trump’s recent measures against Turkey.

The German and Russian leaders last met in May, when Putin welcomed Merkel to his residence in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi.

“I would view this meeting in a wider, global context,’’ said Stefan Meister, director of programs on Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. “I don’t see this as a signal of warming relations between Berlin and Moscow, but they share common points of interest where they are increasingly willing to cooperate.’’

At the top of that list would be the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which would carry natural gas directly to Germany from Russia via the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine and Poland.

The United States has always opposed the idea, and before the opening of a NATO summit last month Trump used it as the basis of a blistering rhetorical attack on Germany, which he said was “captive to Russia.’’

Berlin maintains economic sanctions against Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. But they are bound by a long history of economic and other ties, as well as the legacy of several bitter wars and of Russia’s Cold War domination of the former East Germany.

Germany is home to about 3 million “Russian-Germans,’’ entitled to claim citizenship by blood as the descendants of Germans who emigrated to Russia centuries ago.

Merkel and Putin, too, have a long, if sometimes troubled, history, stretching back before she took office in 2005. She speaks fluent Russian, he fluent German.

And although she has a reputation both for reserve on the international stage and for coolly resisting authoritarian leaders, the two have spoken regularly on the phone, despite the Crimea crisis of 2014 and Russia’s escalation of an armed conflict in eastern Ukraine the following year.

Weeks after Trump’s verbal attack on the pipeline at the NATO meeting, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia flew to Berlin to meet with Merkel and her foreign minister, Heiko Maas. General Valery V. Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, also took part in the discussions, which focused on the situation in Syria.

Merkel continues to be haunted politically by fallout from her 2015 response to Syria’s humanitarian crisis, allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, though the number of Syrians seeking asylum in Germany has dropped since then.

A deal that would allow some of those Syrian refugees to return home could shore up her position. Moscow has supported Syria.