Vladimir Putin
Biden trip takeaways: Respect, optimism, some skepticism
President Joe Biden’s first overseas trip put his diplomatic and negotiating philosophy on display, as he rallied traditional U.S. democratic allies to confront new and old challenges and offered an often rosy take on the possibilities of cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin after a one-on-one summit.
Here are some key takeaways:
A RESET THEY DIDN’T CALL A RESET
Biden and Putin did not use the word “reset” to describe the state of relations between the two nations after their summit in Switzerland. But that’s what the meeting amounted to, with both men staking out clear areas of disagreement, even as they pointed to smaller-scale areas where they could cooperate.
They conveyed both a mutual respect and a mutual skepticism. It was an abrupt return to more conventional U.S.-Russia framing after the presidency of Donald Trump, who often seemed to elevate Putin and create at least the aspiration that the countries could be more like partners.
This time, each leader left with the understanding that some of the old rules still apply. Russia returns to its place as a “worthy adversary,” as Biden put it, rather than some kind of colleague. And the longer-standing tensions, over cyberwarfare and human rights, remain.
THE ART OF THE FACE
After their three-hour meeting, Biden’s sunny disposition stood in sharp contrast to the more sober, taciturn tone of Putin, who at times became defensive when asked questions by reporters about human rights violations in Russia and the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Even so, Biden acknowledged his optimism was more wishful thinking than reality.
“I’m going to drive you all crazy because I know you want me to always put a negative thrust on things, particularly in public,” he said shortly before boarding Air Force One, adding, that way, “you guarantee nothing happens.”
Also read: Biden abroad: Pitching America to welcoming if wary allies
It highlighted the president’s negotiating style, whether it be with Putin or with Senate Republicans at home on infrastructure — in which he publicly expresses his belief that a deal can be struck despite often overwhelming odds.
“I know we make foreign policy out to be this great, great skill that somehow is sort of like a secret code,” Biden said. “All foreign policy is a logical extension of personal relationships. It’s the way human nature functions.”
He later added, “There’s a value to being realistic and to put on an optimistic front, an optimistic face.”
.... AND THE FACE-TO-FACE
Biden’s eight-day, three-country foreign trip demonstrated his emphasis on personal relationships above all.
“There’s no substitute, as those of you who have covered me for a while know, for face-to-face dialogue between leaders. None,” Biden said, declaring his summit with Putin a success simply for the fact that they spoke in person.
Throughout his trip, most of Biden’s meetings were conducted in private, without cameras, or with only a few moments open to media.
It highlighted Biden’s faith in intangible personal ties that can drive policy outcomes, both foreign and domestic.
And it marked a clear departure in style from Trump, whose freewheeling public meetings with global leaders became something of legend on the international stage. Relationships tended to flow one way — with obsequious public displays by heads of state and government trying to get on Trump’s good side.
Also read: ‘Practical work’ summit for Biden, Putin: No punches or hugs
Biden is banking that those leaders will welcome a return to the “old school” approach.
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Before leaving Washington, Biden reasserted his view that democracies are in a generational confrontation with autocratic governments and that the U.S. can’t hope to prevail if it stands alone.
With that in mind, he rallied American allies at the Group of Seven meeting of wealthy democracies and treaty partners at NATO, before his sit-down with Putin.
The sequencing was as much strategy as it was symbolism, with the unified-front posture with allies meant to bolster Biden’s position regarding Russia. It also drove momentum behind the U.S.’ ongoing showdown with China over trade, security and health policy, as Biden secured tough language on China, both in the G-7 leaders’ communique and from NATO countries in their joint statement.
MAD, BUT DON’T CALL IT A NEW COLD WAR
In the wake of a series of disruptive cyberattacks that have emanated from Russia, Biden pressed Putin to curtail criminal and state-sponsored activity from his country by warning of American digital firepower and his willingness to deploy it.
Saying he gave Putin a list of 16 “critical infrastructure” sectors, from the energy industry to water systems, Biden said the leaders agreed to task experts “to work on specific understandings about what’s off-limits” in this new domain.
Even as Biden said of Putin, “I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War,” the American president embraced a defining characteristic of that era: deterrence.
Biden said he broached with Putin and his top advisers the possibility of a cyberattack taking down one of their oil pipelines and the devastating impact it could have on their energy-dependent economy.
Also read: Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit
Biden said Putin was well aware that the U.S. has “significant cyber capability.” “He doesn’t know exactly what it is, but it’s significant, and if in fact they violate these basic norms, we will respond, he knows, in a cyber way.”
DOMESTIC TENSIONS CLOUD GLOBAL TALKS
After four years of “America First” under Trump, Biden set out to show the world that “America is back,” but lingering domestic instability cast a long shadow overseas.
Whether it be the last president’s temperament and isolationist policies or the months of efforts to undermine the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the tumult of the last four years remains a fresh and raw memory for allies and adversaries alike.
Biden’s actions and public comments showed the lengths to which he felt he needed to go to reassure allies that the U.S. could be a credible leader on the world stage.
“They have seen things happen, as we have, that shocked them and surprised them,” Biden said Monday of American allies. “But I think they, like I do, believe the American people are not going to sustain that kind of behavior.”
Even if allies were convinced, it was clear that adversaries were unwilling to forget so soon.
In his news conference following his meeting with Biden, Putin repeatedly deflected from his own deadly crackdowns on political dissenters with familiar — but now more potent — whataboutisms, by pointing to the Capitol assault and Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice and police brutality in the U.S. last year. Biden called it a “ridiculous comparison,” though it was clear some damage couldn’t be swiftly undone.
Biden abroad: Pitching America to welcoming if wary allies
President Joe Biden spent his first trip overseas highlighting a sharp break from his disruptive predecessor, selling that the United States was once more a reliable ally with a steady hand at the wheel. European allies welcomed the pitch — and even a longtime foe acknowledged it.
But while Biden returned Wednesday night to Washington after a week across the Atlantic that was a mix of messaging and deliverables, questions remained as to whether those allies would trust that Biden truly represents a long-lasting reset or whether Russia’s Vladimir Putin would curb his nation’s misbehaviors.
Biden’s mantra, which he uttered in Geneva and Brussels and on the craggy coast of Cornwall, England, was that “America was back.” It was Putin, of all people, on the trip’s final moments, who may have best defined Biden’s initial voyage overseas.
“President Biden is an experienced statesman,” Putin told reporters. “He is very different from President Trump.”
Read:‘Practical work’ summit for Biden, Putin: No punches or hugs
But the summit with Putin in Geneva, which shadowed the entire trip and brought it to its close, also underscored the fragility of Biden’s declarations that the global order had returned.
Though both men declared the talks constructive, Putin’s rhetoric did not change, as he refused to accept any responsibility for his nation’s election interference, cyberhacking or crackdown on domestic political opponents. At the summit’s conclusion Biden acknowledged that he could not be confident that Putin would change his behavior even with newly threatened consequences.
Biden’s multilateral summits with fellow democracies — the Group of Seven wealthy nations and NATO — were largely punctuated by sighs of relief from European leaders who had been rattled by President Donald Trump over four years. Yet there were still closed-door disagreement on just how the Western powers should deal with Russia or Biden’s declaration that an economic competition with China would define the 21st century.
“Everyone at the table understood and understands both the seriousness and the challenges that we’re up against, and the responsibility of our proud democracies to step up and deliver for the rest of the world,” Biden said Sunday in England.
As vice president and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden had trotted the globe for more than four decades before he stepped off Air Force One and onto foreign soil for the first time as commander in chief. His initial stop, after a speech to thank U.S. troops stationed in England, was for a gathering with the other G-7 leaders.
The leaders staked their claim to bringing the world out of the coronavirus pandemic and crisis, pledging more than 1 billion coronavirus vaccine doses to poorer nations, vowing to help developing countries grow while fighting climate change and backing a minimum tax on multinational firms.
Read: Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit
At the group’s first face-to-face meeting in two years because of the pandemic, the leaders dangled promises of support for global health, green energy, infrastructure and education — all to demonstrate that international cooperation is back after the upheavals caused by the pandemic and Trump’s unpredictability. There were concerns, though, that not enough was done to combat climate change and that 1 billion doses were not nearly sufficient to meet the stated goal of ending the COVID-19 pandemic globally by the end of 2022.
The seven nations met in Cornwall and largely adhered to Biden’s hope that they rally together to declare they would be a better friend to poorer nations than authoritarian rivals such as China. A massive infrastructure plan for the developing world, meant to compete with Beijing’s efforts, was commissioned, and China was called out for human rights abuses, prompting an angry response from the Asian power.
But even then, there were strains, with Germany, Italy and the representatives for the European Union reluctant to call out China, a valuable trading partner, too harshly. And there a wariness in some European capitals that it was Biden, rather than Trump, who was the aberration to American foreign policy and that the United States could soon fall back into a transactional, largely inward-looking approach.
After Cornwall, the scene shifted to Brussels where many of the same faces met for a gathering at NATO. Biden used the moment to highlight the renewed U.S. commitment to the 30-country alliance that was formed as a bulwark to Moscow’s aggression but frequently maligned by his predecessor.
He also underscored the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the alliance charter, which spells out that an attack — including, as of this summit, some cyberattacks — on any member is an assault on all and is to be met with a collective response. Trump had refused to commit to the pact and had threatened to pull the U.S. out of the alliance.
Read: Buoyed by allied summits, Biden ready to take on Putin
“Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation,” said Biden. “I want NATO to know America is there.”
When Air Force One touched back down in Washington, Biden again faced an uncertain future for his legislative agenda, the clock ticking on a deadline to land a bipartisan infrastructure deal as the president was confronted with growing intransigence from Republicans and mounting impatience from fellow Democrats. But Biden and his aides believe he accomplished what he set out to do in Europe.
The most tactile of politicians, Biden reveled in the face-to-face diplomacy, having grown frustrated with trying to negotiate with world leaders over Zoom. Even amid some disagreements, he was greeted warmly by most of his peers, other presidents and prime ministers eager to exchange awkward elbow bumps and adopt his “build back better” catchphrase.
At the end of each day, Biden would huddle with aides, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, eagerly going over a play-by-play of the day’s meetings and preparing for the next. Aides padded his schedule with some down time to pace the 78-year-old president, though there were still a few missteps, including some verbal flubs and when he simply neglected to announce a Boeing-Airbus deal in front of the European Council.
His summit with Putin, coming three years after Trump sided with the Russian leader over U.S. intelligence agencies when those two men met in Helsinki, loomed over the trip, with the cable networks giving it Super Bowl levels of hype. Aides wanted to confront Putin early in the presidency, with some hope of reining in Moscow and reaching some stability so the administration could more squarely focus on China.
There were no fireworks in their summit near the Swiss Alps, and the nations agreed to return ambassadors to each other’s capitals and took some small steps toward strategic stability.
Read: What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit
But while Biden was able to deliver stern warnings to Putin behind closed doors, he also extracted few promises. In the Russian president’s post-summit remarks, he engaged in classic Putin misdirection and what-about-ism to undermine any of the United States’ moral high ground.
In his own Geneva news conference, Biden stood against a postcard-perfect backdrop of a tree-lined lake, taking off his suit jacket as the sun beat down from behind, so bright that reporters had trouble looking directly at the president.
Once more, Biden declared that America was back, but he also soberly made clear that it was impossible to immediately know if any progress with Russia had, in fact, been made.
“What will change their behavior is if the rest of world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world,” Biden said. “I’m not confident of anything; I’m just stating a fact.”
‘Practical work’ summit for Biden, Putin: No punches or hugs
U.S. President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin exchanged cordial words and plotted modest steps on arms control and diplomacy but emerged from their much-anticipated Swiss summit Wednesday largely where they started -- with deep differences on human rights, cyberattacks, election interference and more.
The two leaders reached an important, but hardly relationship-changing agreement to return their chief diplomats to Moscow and Washington after they were called home as the relationship deteriorated in recent months. And Biden and Putin agreed to start working on a plan to solidify their countries’ last remaining treaty limiting nuclear weapons.
But their three hours of talks on the shores of Lake Geneva left both men standing firmly in the same positions they had started in.
“I’m not confident he’ll change his behavior,” Biden said at a post-summit news conference, when he was asked about what evidence he saw that former KGB agent Putin would adjust his ways and actions. “What will change his behavior is the rest of the world reacts to them, and they diminish their standing in the world. I’m not confident in anything.”
Read:Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit
Both the White House and Kremlin had set low expectations going into the summit. They issued a joint statement after the conclusion that said their meeting showed the “practical work our two countries can do to advance our mutual interests and also benefit the world.”
But over and over, Biden defaulted to “we’ll find out” when assessing whether their discussions about nuclear power, cybersecurity and other thorny issues will pay off.
Back-to-back news conferences by Biden and Putin after the summit also put in stark relief that getting at the root of tensions between the U.S. and Russia will remain an enormously difficult task — including when the two sides, at least in public comments, sketched dramatically different realities on cyber matters.
Biden came into the summit pushing Putin to clamp down on the surge of Russian-originated cybersecurity and ransomware attacks that have targeted businesses and government agencies in the U.S. and around the globe. But when the summit ended, it wasn’t evident that more than superficial progress had been made.
Biden said he made clear to Putin that if Russia crossed certain red lines — including going after major American infrastructure — his administration would respond and “the consequences of that would be devastating,”
Putin, in turn, continued to insist Russia had nothing to do with cyber intrusions despite U.S. intelligence evidence that indicates otherwise.
“Most of the cyberattacks in the world are carried out from the cyber realm of the United States,” said Putin, also adding Canada, two Latin American countries he didn’t name and Britain to the list.
Read: Buoyed by allied summits, Biden ready to take on Putin
While the U.S., Canada and Britain all engage in cyberespionage, the most damaging cyberattacks on record have come either from state-backed Russian hackers or Russian-speaking ransomware criminals who operate with impunity in Russia and allied nations.
In fact, the worst have been attributed by the United States and the European Union to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, including the NotPetya virus that did more than $10 billion in economic damage in 2017, hitting companies including shipping giant Maersk, the pharmaceutical company Merck and food company Mondolez.
Putin agreed at the summit that Russia will begin consultations with the U.S. on the matter and acknowledged that ransomware and cyberattacks are big problems. Still, he maintained that the two countries “just need to abandon various insinuations.”
Despite the clear differences, Biden insisted that progress had been made, scolding reporters for being too pessimistic during a chat on the tarmac just before he boarded Air Force One to return home.
“There is a value to being realistic and putting on ... an optimistic face, ” the president said.
Biden said the two leaders spent a “great deal of time” discussing cybersecurity and he believed Putin understood the U.S. position.
“I pointed out to him, we have significant cyber capability,” Biden said. “In fact, (if) they violate basic norms, we will respond.”
Read:What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit
A disconnect between the two leaders was apparent on other matters, large and small.
Biden raised human rights issues with Putin, including the fate of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Putin defended Navalny’s prison sentence and deflected repeated questions about mistreatment of Russian opposition leaders by highlighting U.S. domestic turmoil, including the Black Lives Matter protests and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Biden was having none of it.
“My response is kind of what I communicated” to Putin, Biden said. “That’s a ridiculous comparison.”
Putin held forth for nearly an hour before international reporters after the summit. While showing defiance at questions about Biden pressing him on human rights, he also expressed respect for the U.S. president as an experienced political leader.
The Russian noted that Biden repeated wise advice his mother had given him and that American president also spoke about his family — messaging that Putin said might not have been entirely relevant to their summit but demonstrated Biden’s “moral values.”
Overall, the tone was more businesslike than Putin’s 2018 summit with then-President Donald Trump, who embraced some of Putin’s unlikely statements about election interference but was considered somewhat amateurish and unpredictable by the Russians.
At this faceoff, though Putin raised doubt that the U.S.-Russia relationship could soon return to a measure of equilibrium of years past, he suggested that Biden was someone he could work with.
Read: Biden, unlike predecessors, has maintained Putin skepticism
“The meeting was actually very efficient,” Putin said. “It was substantive, it was specific. It was aimed at achieving results, and one of them was pushing back the frontiers of trust.”
The summit had a somewhat awkward beginning — both men appeared to avoid looking directly at each other during a brief and chaotic photo opportunity before a scrum of jostling reporters.
It ended sooner than expected. Biden said that was because they had covered all the key areas and then “looked at each other like, OK, what next?”
Then Biden answered his own question
“What is going to happen next is we are going to be able to look back, look ahead in three to six months and say ‘Did the things we agreed to sit down and try to work out, did it work?’”
Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit
U.S. President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin sit down Wednesday for their highly anticipated summit i n the Swiss city of Geneva, a moment of high-stakes diplomacy at a time when both leaders agree that relations between their countries are at an all-time low.
For four months, the two leaders have traded sharp rhetoric. Biden repeatedly called out Putin for malicious cyberattacks by Russian-based hackers on U.S. interests, a disregard for democracy with the jailing of Russia’s foremost opposition leader and interference in American elections.
Putin, for his part, has reacted with whatabout-isms and obfuscations — pointing to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to argue that the U.S. has no business lecturing on democratic norms and insisting that the Russian government hasn’t been involved in any election interference or cyberattacks despite U.S. intelligence showing otherwise.
Now, the pair will meet for their first face-to-face as leaders — a conversation that is expected to last four to five hours. In advance, both sides set out to lower expectations.
Read: Buoyed by allied summits, Biden ready to take on Putin
Even so, Biden has said it would be an important step if the United States and Russia were able to ultimately find “stability and predictability” in their relationship, a seemingly modest goal from the president for dealing with the person he sees as one of America’s fiercest adversaries.
“We should decide where it’s in our mutual interest, in the interest of the world, to cooperate, and see if we can do that,” Biden told reporters earlier this week. “And the areas where we don’t agree, make it clear what the red lines are.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that no breakthroughs were expected and that “the situation is too difficult in Russian-American relations.”
“However, the fact that the two presidents agreed to meet and finally start to speak openly about the problems is already an achievement,” Peskov said several hours before the summit’s scheduled start time.
Arrangements for the meeting have been carefully choreographed and vigorously negotiated by both sides.
Biden first floated the meeting in an April phone call in which he informed Putin that he would be expelling several Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions against dozens of people and companies, part of an effort to hold the Kremlin accountable for interference in last year’s presidential election and the hacking of federal agencies.
Putin and his entourage will arrive first at the summit site: Villa La Grange, a grand lakeside mansion set in Geneva’s biggest park. Next come Biden and his team. Swiss President Guy Parmelin will greet the two leaders.
Read: What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit
The three will spend a moment together in front of the cameras, but only Parmelin is expected to make remarks, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.
Biden and Putin first will hold a relatively intimate meeting joined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Each side will have a translator.
The meeting will then expand to include five senior aides on each side.
After the meeting concludes, Putin is scheduled to hold a solo news conference, with Biden following suit. The White House opted against a joint news conference, deciding it did not want to appear to elevate Putin at a moment when the president is urging European allies to pressure Putin to cut out myriad provocations.
Biden sees himself with few peers on foreign policy. He traveled the globe as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was given difficult foreign policy assignments by President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president. His portfolio included messy spots like Iraq and Ukraine and weighing the mettle of China’s Xi Jinping during his rise to power.
He has repeatedly said that he believes executing effective foreign policy comes from forming strong personal relations, and he has managed to find rapport with both the likes of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Biden has labeled an “autocrat,” and conventional politicians like Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
Read: Biden eases trade friction with EU ahead of Putin summit
But with Putin, whom the president has “no soul,” Biden has long been wary. At the same time, he acknowledges that Putin, who remained the most powerful figure in Russian politics over the span of five U.S. presidents, is not without talent. Biden this week suggested that he is approaching his meeting with Putin carefully.
“He’s bright. He’s tough,” Biden said. “And I have found that he is a — as they say...a worthy adversary.”
The White House held on to hope of finding small areas of agreement.
No commitments have been made, but according to the senior administration official, there are hopes that both sides will return their ambassadors to their respective postings following the meeting. Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was recalled from Washington about three months ago after Biden called Putin a killer; U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan left Moscow almost two months ago, after Russia suggested he return to Washington for consultations.
Both ambassadors will be in Geneva during Wednesday’s meeting.
Biden administration officials say they think common ground can be found on arms control. International arms control groups are pressing the Russian and American leaders to start a push for new arms control by holding “strategic stability” talks — a series of government-to-government discussions meant to sort through the many areas of disagreement and tension on the national security front.
The Biden team will press its concerns on cybersecurity. In recent months, Russia-based hackers have launched alarming attacks on a major U.S. oil pipeline and a Brazil-headquartered meat supplier that operates in the U.S.
Read:Biden, unlike predecessors, has maintained Putin skepticism
The Russian side has said that the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is an internal political matter and one area where Putin won’t engage Biden. But the senior Biden administration official said there “is no issue that is off the table for the president,” suggesting Navalny will come up.
The meeting is sure to invite comparisons with President Donald Trump’s 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, where the two leaders held a joint news conference and Trump sided with Russian denials when asked whether Moscow had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
Biden has prepared for his one-on-one by reviewing materials and consulting with officials across government and with outside advisers. Aides said the level of preparation wasn’t unusual. Biden, in a brief exchange with reporters upon a rriving in Geneva on Tuesday night, sought to offer the impression that he wasn’t sweating his big meeting.
“I am always ready,” Biden said.
What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit
An American president won’t side with Moscow over his own intelligence agencies. There will be no talk of a “reset” in Russian relations. And it is highly doubtful that anyone will gaze into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and discuss his soul.
But beyond that, it’s not clear what will happen Wednesday in Geneva when President Joe Biden meets Putin for the first time since taking office. Both sides acknowledge that the relationship between the two nations is dismal and neither holds out much hope for meaningful areas of agreement. Still, each man brings his own goals to the summit table.
A look at what each president is hoping to achieve in Switzerland:
WHAT BIDEN WANTS
Biden and his aides have made clear that he will not follow in the footsteps of his recent predecessors by aiming to radically alter the United States’ ties to Russia. Instead, the White House is looking for a more modest though still vitally important goal: to move toward a more predictable relationship and attempt to rein in Russia’s disruptive behavior.
READ: Biden eases trade friction with EU ahead of Putin summit
Biden’s first overseas trip was deliberately sequenced so that he will meet with Putin only after spending days meeting with European allies and powerful democracies, including a gathering at NATO, the decades-old alliance formed to serve as a bulwark to Russian aggression. He hoped to project a sense of unity and renewed cooperation after four years of tumult under former President Donald Trump, who often tried to cozy up to the Russian president.
Biden will push Putin to stop meddling in democratic elections, to ease tensions with Ukraine and to stop giving safe harbor to hackers carrying out cyber and ransomware attacks. Aides believe that lowering the temperature with Russia will also reinforce the United States’ ties to democracies existing in Moscow’s shadow.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden will look for “areas where, in our common interest, we can work together to produce outcomes that are — that work for the United States and for the American people.”
Sullivan, who briefed reporters on Air Force One heading to Brussels for the NATO summit, said that Biden’s other message would be more stick than carrot: “How do we send a clear message about those harmful activities that we will not tolerate and to which we will respond?”
There have been brief moments of common ground. Moscow and Washington have shown a shared interest in restarting talks on strategic stability to work out a follow-up deal to the New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russian arms control pact that was extended for five years in January.
READ: Syria’s last aid crossing in balance as Biden to meet Putin
Biden will exhort Putin on human rights, including the poisoning and imprisonment of dissident Alexei Navalny, to not support the regime in Belarus that carried out a recent skyjacking and to stop interfering with other nations’ elections. Cyber will also be a focal point, with the Geneva summit coming just days after NATO expanded its Article 5 mutual defense pact to include cyberattacks.
But the president acknowledged that there may be no way to keep Putin in check.
“There’s no guarantee you can change a person’s behavior or the behavior of his country. Autocrats have enormous power and they don’t have to answer to a public,” said Biden during a news conference Sunday after the Group of Seven summit in England. “And the fact is that it may very well be, if I respond in kind — which I will — that it doesn’t dissuade him and he wants to keep going.”
Biden had not minced words when it comes to assessing Putin. He said in an interview earlier this year that he agreed with an assessment that Putin was a “killer,” and he once declared that Putin didn’t have a soul.
That was far colder rhetoric that his immediate predecessors.
Trump spoke warmly of Putin and was deferential to him during their one summit, held in Helsinki in 2018, in which he turned his back on his own intelligence agencies. President Barack Obama’s administration, though wary of Putin, expressed hope in a “reset” and improvement of relations with Moscow. And George W. Bush said that he “looked the man in the eye” and “found him very straightforward and trustworthy.”
“I was able to get a sense of his soul,” Bush said.
Biden won’t.
WHAT PUTIN WANTS
Putin also won’t be expecting to warm up ties. His main goal would be to draw his red lines to the new U.S. administration and negotiate a tense status quo that would protect Moscow’s vital interests.
The Russian leader doesn’t hope for a new détente to mend the rift caused by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Nor does he count on a rollback of the crippling U.S. and EU sanctions that have restricted Moscow’s access to global financial markets and top Western technologies.
Putin’s task now is more modest — to spell out Russia’s top security concerns and try to restore basic channels of communication that would prevent an even more dangerous destabilization.
The main red line for Moscow is Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO. Fearing its bid for the alliance membership, Putin responded to the 2014 ouster of Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president by annexing Crimea and throwing Moscow’s weight behind a separatist insurgency in the country’s eastern industrial heartland where the seven-year conflict has killed more than 14,000.
When tensions along the line of contact in Ukraine’s east rose earlier this year, Russia quickly beefed up its troops near Ukraine and warned Kiev’s leaders that it would intervene militarily if they try to reclaim the rebel-controlled regions by force.
Moscow has since pulled back some of its forces from the border areas, but the Ukrainian leadership has said the bulk of them have remained close to the border.
In an interview with state TV last week, Putin described Ukraine’s bid to join NATO as an existential challenge to Russia that would allow the alliance’s missiles to hit Moscow and other targets in western Russia in just seven minutes. He compared it to Russia deploying its missiles in Canada or Mexico near the U.S. border. “Isn’t it a red line?” he said.
While taking a tough stance on Ukraine, the Russian leader could show a degree of flexibility on other global hotspots.
Even though Moscow has been critical of the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan, it’s interested in a settlement that would prevent the country from plunging into chaos following the U.S. troops’ withdrawal later this year, fearing that instability could spill into ex-Soviet Central Asia.
Russia also has been involved in painstaking international talks to help repair a nuclear deal with Iran that was spiked by Trump, and it has expressed a willingness to cooperate with the U.S. in efforts to restart the stalled Mideast peace talks.
And the Kremlin would be interested in working out a deal on Syria, where Moscow’s military campaign helped President Bashar Assad’s government reclaim control over most of the country after a devastating civil war and the U.S. has maintained a limited military presence.
Russia has said it’s ready to include its prospective doomsday weapons — such as the Poseidon atomic-powered, nuclear-armed underwater drone and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile — to the talks’ agenda on condition the U.S. brings its missile defense and possible space-based weapons into the equation.
Putin also has emphasized Russia’s readiness to make joint efforts to address climate change and cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
He called for establishing a dialogue on cybercrime, noting that Moscow could agree to extradite cybercrime suspects to the U.S. if Washington takes the same obligation.
The White House has strongly downplayed the idea of a cybercriminal prisoner exchange.
Biden, unlike predecessors, has maintained Putin skepticism
President Joe Biden frequently talks about what he sees as central in executing effective foreign policy: building personal relationships.
But unlike his four most recent White House predecessors, who made an effort to build a measure of rapport with Vladimir Putin, Biden has made clear that the virtue of fusing a personal connection might have its limits when it comes to the Russian leader.
The president, who is set to meet with Putin face-to-face on Wednesday in Geneva, has repeated an anecdote about his last meeting with Putin, 10 years ago when he was vice president and Putin was serving as prime minister. Putin had taken a break from the presidency because the Russian constitution at the time prohibited a third consecutive term, but he was still seen as Russia’s most powerful leader.
Biden recalled to biographer Evan Osnos that during that meeting in 2011, Putin showed him his ornate office in Moscow. Biden recalling poking Putin — a former KGB officer — that “it’s amazing what capitalism will do.”
Read:Biden at NATO: Ready to talk China, Russia and soothe allies
Biden said he then turned around and standing inches from Putin said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.” Biden said Putin smiled and responded: “We understand one another.”
Biden’s comment was in part a dig at former President George W. Bush, who faced ridicule after his first meeting with Putin when he claimed that he had “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” But in replaying his decade-old exchange with Putin, Biden also has attempted to demonstrate he is clear-eyed about the Russian leader in a way his predecessors weren’t.
Biden and Putin are now meeting again, at a moment when the U.S.-Russia relationship seems to get more complicated by the day. Biden has repeatedly taken Putin to task — and levied sanctions against Russian entities and individuals in Putin’s orbit — over allegations of Russian interference in the 2020 election and the hacking of federal agencies in what is known as the SolarWinds breach.
Despite the sanctions, Putin has been unmoved. Cyber attacks in the U.S. originating from Russian-based hackers in recent weeks have also impacted a major oil pipeline and the largest meat supplier in the world. Putin has denied Kremlin involvement.
Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who was with Biden for the 2011 meeting with Putin, said in an interview that Biden might have a deeper skepticism and perhaps more informed view of Putin than any of his White House predecessors.
“Biden’s knowledge of the region may be better than anybody that’s held the job,” McFaul said. “Biden has spent time in Georgia. He spent a lot of time in Ukraine. I traveled with him to Moldova, and he’s spent a lot of time in the eastern parts of the NATO alliance. He has been in those places and heard firsthand about Russian aggression and Russian threat. ... It has created a unique component of his analysis of Putin that other presidents have not had.”
Indeed, as president, Biden has said he would take a far different tack in his relationship with Putin than former President Donald Trump, who showed unusual deference to Putin, and the three other past U.S. presidents, whose political lives overlapped Putin’s time in power.
During his first visit of his presidency to the State Department, in February, Biden told agency employees that the days of “rolling over” for Putin were over — a not-so thinly veiled shot at Trump. Later, in an ABC News interview, Biden answered affirmatively that Putin was “a killer.”
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Trump’s tendency to genuflect to Putin had many in Washington openly questioning whether the Russians had something embarrassing on the real estate mogul. Both Trump and Putin publicly denied the speculation.
Trump repeatedly tried to scotch the notion — underscored by U.S. intelligence findings — that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. Asked at their joint news conference at the end of their 2018 summit in Helsinki whom he believed — U.S. intelligence or Putin — Trump demurred.
The White House said that Biden would not hold a joint news conference with Putin, but would speak to media on his own after Wednesday’s meeting. Administration officials say that Biden doesn’t want to elevate Putin. Asked Sunday why years of U.S. sanctions haven’t changed Putin’s behavior, Biden laughed and responded: “He’s Vladimir Putin.”″
Barack Obama came into office seeking a reset of the U.S.-Russia relationship, an effort to improve relations with Russian leadership and find areas of common interest.
Before his visit to Moscow early in his first term Obama spoke dismissively of Putin, saying the then-prime minister had “one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.” But after meeting face-to-face during the trip, Obama pronounced he was “very convinced the prime minister is a man of today and he’s got his eyes firmly on the future.”
That feeling didn’t last.
By the time Obama and Putin met on the sidelines of the 2013 Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland, the reset effort was on life support.
Read:Biden to assure allies, meet Putin during 1st overseas trip
At the time, G-8 leaders were unsuccessfully pressing Putin to join a call for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down and former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had been allowed to stay in Russia after releasing highly classified American intelligence.
Obama and Putin’s disdain for each other was palpable. During a photo opportunity before the press in Northern Ireland, they sat grim faced and avoided looking at each other.
In 2014, after Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, any vapor of hope for a reset had evaporated.
George W. Bush tried mightily to charm Putin, hosting him at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and bringing him to his father’s estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the 43rd and 41st presidents took the Russian president fishing.
But Putin ultimately flummoxed Bush and the relationship was badly damaged after Russia’s 2008 invasion of its neighbor Georgia after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his troops into the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Bill Clinton was the first U.S. president to deal with Putin, meeting him for the first time in 1999 at the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering months before Putin would succeed Boris Yeltsin as president and a little over a year before the end of Clinton’s presidency.
In a phone call with Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair in November 2000, Clinton called Putin “a guy with a lot of ambition for the Russians” but also expressed concern that Putin “could get squishy on democracy,” according to a transcript of the call published by the Clinton Presidential Archives.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week that Biden has known Putin for a long time and “never held back” on voicing his concerns.
Read:Face to face: June summit for Biden, Putin as tensions rise
“This is not about friendship. It’s not about trust,” Psaki said. “It’s about what’s in the interest of the United States. And, in our view, that is moving toward a more stable and predictable relationship.”
Biden has managed several complicated relationships with foreign leaders during his nearly 50 years in national politics. He’s developed a rapport with China’s Xi Jinping — spending days traveling with Xi in the U.S. and China. Biden in recent days has told aides that his relationship with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan has remained strong despite differences over U.S. support for Kurds in northwest Syria and Biden disparaging Erdogan as an autocrat.
But Putin has left Biden with fundamentally more difficult problems that personal diplomacy can’t fix, said Rachel Ellehuus, deputy director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“With someone like Erdogan, Xi or the North Korean (Kim Jong Un), Biden has had this sense that we have something they want,” Ellehuus said. “Biden has long recognized that the only thing Putin really wants is to undermine the U.S., to divide NATO, to divide the EU. Biden knows there’s little common ground to work from with Putin.”
Biden to assure allies, meet Putin during 1st overseas trip
Set to embark on the first overseas trip of his term, President Joe Biden is eager to reassert the United States on the world stage, steadying European allies deeply shaken by his predecessor and pushing democracy as the only bulwark to rising forces of authoritarianism.
Biden has set the stakes for his eight-day trip in sweeping terms, believing that the West must publicly demonstrate it can compete economically with China as the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.
Building toward his trip-ending summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Biden will aim to reassure European capitals that the United States can once again be counted on as a dependable partner to thwart Moscow’s aggression both on their eastern front and their internet battlefields.
The trip will be far more about messaging than specific actions or deals. And the paramount priority for Biden, who leaves Wednesday for his first stop in the United Kingdom, is to convince the world that his administration is not just a fleeting deviation in the trajectory of an American foreign policy that many allies fear irrevocably drifted toward a more transactional outlook under former President Donald Trump.
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“The trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of Joe Biden’s foreign policy,” said national security adviser Jake Sullivan, “to rally the world’s democracies to tackle the great challenges of our time.”
Biden’s to-do list is ambitious.
In their face-to-face sit-down in Geneva, Biden wants to privately pressure Putin to end myriad provocations, including cybersecurity attacks on American businesses by Russian-based hackers, the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and repeated overt and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in U.S. elections.
Biden is also looking to rally allies on their COVID-19 response and to urge them to coalesce around a strategy to check emerging economic and national security competitor China even as the U.S. expresses concern about Europe’s economic links to Moscow. Biden also wants to nudge outlying allies, including Australia, to make more aggressive commitments to the worldwide effort to curb global warming.
The week-plus journey is a big moment for Biden, who traveled the world for decades as vice president and as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and will now step off Air Force One on international soil as commander in chief. He will face world leaders still grappling with the virus and rattled by four years of Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy and moves that strained longtime alliances as the former president made overtures to strongmen.
“In this moment of global uncertainty, as the world still grapples with a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed previewing his diplomatic efforts, “this trip is about realizing America’s renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.”
The president first travels to Britain for a summit of the Group of Seven leaders and then Brussels for a NATO summit and a meeting with the heads of the European Union. It comes at a moment when Europeans have diminished expectations for what they can expect of U.S. leadership on the foreign stage.
Central and Eastern Europeans are desperately hoping to bind the U.S. more tightly to their security. Germany is looking to see the U.S. troop presence maintained there so it doesn’t need to build up its own. France, meanwhile, has taken the tack that the U.S. can’t be trusted as it once was and that the European Union must pursue greater strategic autonomy going forward.
“I think the concern is real that the Trumpian tendencies in the U.S. could return full bore in the midterms or in the next presidential election,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. diplomat and once deputy secretary general of NATO.
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The sequencing of the trip is deliberate: Biden consulting with Western European allies for much of a week as a show of unity before his summit with Putin.
His first stop late Wednesday will be an address to U.S. troops stationed in Britain, and the next day he sits down with British Prime Minster Boris Johnson. The two men will meet a day ahead of the G-7 summit to be held above the craggy cliffs of Cornwall overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
The most tactile of politicians, Biden has grown frustrated by the diplomacy-via-Zoom dynamics of the pandemic and has relished the ability to again have face-to-face meetings that allow him to size up and connect with world leaders. While Biden himself is a veteran statesman, many of the world leaders he will see in England, including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron, took office after Biden left the vice presidency. Another, Germany’s Angela Merkel, will leave office later this year.
There are several potential areas of tension. On climate change, the U.S. is aiming to regain its credibility after Trump pulled the country back from the fight against global warming. Biden could also feel pressure on trade, an issue to which he’s yet to give much attention. And with the United States well supplied with COVID-19 vaccines yet struggling to persuade some of its own citizens to use it, leaders whose inoculation campaigns have been slower will surely pressure Biden to share more surplus around the globe.
Another central focus will be China. Biden and the other G-7 leaders will announce an infrastructure financing program for developing countries that is meant to compete directly with Beijing’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. But not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with the techno-security state as the defining competition for the 21st century.
The European Union has avoided taking as strong a stance on Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement or treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province as the Biden administration may like. But there are signs that Europe is willing to put greater scrutiny on Beijing.
The EU in March announced sanctions targeting four Chinese officials involved with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Beijing, in turn, responded by imposing sanctions on several members of the European Parliament and other Europeans critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden is also scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels, a face-to-face meeting between two leaders who have had many fraught moments in their relationship over the years.
Biden waited until April to call Erdogan for the first time as president. In that call, he informed the Turkish leader that he would formally recognize that the systematic killings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 20th century were “genocide” — using a term for the atrocities that his White House predecessors had avoided for decades over concerns of alienating Turkey.
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The trip finale will be Biden’s meeting with Putin.
Biden has taken a very different approach to Russia than Trump’s friendly outreach. Their sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump’s refusal to side with U.S. intelligence agencies over Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the election two years earlier.
Biden could well be challenged by unrest at home as Russia looks to exploit the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and the debate over voting rights to undermine the U.S. position as a global role model. The American president, in turn, is expected to push Russia to quell its global meddling.
“By and large, these are not meetings on outcomes, these are ‘get to know you again’ meetings for the U.S. and Europe,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s about delivering a message to Putin, to reviving old alliances and to demonstrate again that the U.S. is back on the right course.”
Face to face: June summit for Biden, Putin as tensions rise
President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin agreed Tuesday to meet next month in Geneva, a face-to-face encounter the White House hopes will help bring some predictability to a fraught relationship that’s only worsened in the first months of the Democratic administration.
The June 16 summit is being tacked on to the end of Biden’s first international trip as president: He’ll also visit Britain for a meeting of Group of Seven world leaders and attend a NATO summit in Brussels.
The agenda is expected to include discussion of Russian action in neighboring Ukraine, this week’s forced diversion of a Lithuania-bound flight by Russian-ally Belarus, efforts by both nations to stem the coronavirus pandemic and more. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said no preconditions were set for the meeting.
The White House is setting low expectations for the meeting. It isn’t expected to lead to any major breakthroughs — let alone the sort of reset of U.S.-Russian relations pursued by Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama, or the curious bonhomie of the Donald Trump-Putin relationship.
Read:White House, Kremlin aim for Biden-Putin summit in Geneva
Instead, officials say Biden — who as a candidate and early in his presidency has warned that he expects the relationship to remain complicated —- is looking to find some common ground with his adversary on the path forward.
The Kremlin, for its part, said the presidents will discuss “the current state and prospects of Russian-U.S. relations, strategic stability issues and the acute problems on the international agenda, including interaction in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and settlement of regional conflicts.”
Biden first proposed the summit in a call with Putin in April as his administration prepared to levy a second round of sanctions against Russian officials during his young presidency. And the U.S. levied more sanctions last week on Russian companies and ships for their work on a European natural gas pipeline called Nord Stream 2. U.S. officials say the pipeline threatens European energy security, heightens Russia’s influence and poses risks to Ukraine and Poland in bypassing both countries.
The White House has repeatedly said it is seeking a “stable and predictable” relationship with the Russians. At the same time, it has called out Putin on allegations that the Russians interfered in last year’s U.S. presidential election and that the Kremlin was behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign in which Russian hackers infected widely used software with malicious code, enabling them to access the networks of at least nine U.S. agencies.
The Biden administration has also criticized Russia for the arrest and jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and publicly acknowledged that it has low to moderate confidence that Russian agents were offering bounties to the Taliban to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Geneva with its bucolic vistas of the Mont Blanc peak — the highest in Western Europe — and a reputation as both a hub for international institutions and an icon of Switzerland’s much ballyhooed neutrality offers an intriguing backdrop for the summit.
The city last hosted American and Russian leaders in 1985, when President Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev — a summit considered short on substance but critical in fostering what would become mostly friendly relations between the two men through their tenures.
The Biden administration announced sanctions in March against several mid-level and senior Russian officials, along with more than a dozen businesses and other entities, over a nearly fatal nerve-agent attack on Navalny in August 2020 and his subsequent jailing. Navalny returned to Russia days before Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration and was quickly arrested.
Read:Putin points finger at US after Biden’s ‘killer’ remark
Last month, the administration announced it was expelling 10 Russian diplomats and sanctioning dozens of Russia companies and individuals in response to the SolarWinds and election interference allegations.
But even as Biden moved forward with the latest round of sanctions, he acknowledged that he held back on taking tougher action — an attempt to send the message to Putin that he still held hope that the U.S. and Russia could come to an understanding for the rules of the game in their adversarial relationship.
Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, criticized Biden’s decision to meet with Putin as “weak.” He raised concerns about Russia’s treatment of Navalny and tepid response to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin ally whose country this week ordered the diversion of a Greece-to-Lithuania commercial flight in order to arrest a dissident journalist.
The senator also criticized Biden for sparing ally Germany sanctions over Nord Stream 2, adamantly opposed by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
“We’re rewarding Putin with a summit?” Sasse said. “Instead of treating Putin like a gangster who fears his own people, we’re giving him his treasured Nord Stream 2 pipeline and legitimizing his actions with a summit.”
Biden in a brief exchange with reporters Tuesday afternoon defended the decision to waive sanctions against Germany for the pipeline. He noted that it is nearly complete and that punishing an ally would have been “counterproductive.”
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed news of the summit. “Diplomacy only has a chance if you talk to each other,” Merkel said.
During his campaign for the White House, Biden described Russia as the “biggest threat” to U.S. security and alliances, and he disparaged Trump for his cozy relationship with Putin.
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Trump avoided direct confrontation with Putin and often sought to play down the Russian leader’s malign actions. Their sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump’s refusal to side with U.S. intelligence agencies over Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Weeks into his presidency, Biden said in an address before State Department employees that he told Putin in their first call “that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions...are over.”
In March, Biden in an ABC News interview responded affirmatively when asked by interviewer George Stephanopoulos whether he thought Putin was “a killer.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Biden’s comment demonstrated he “definitely does not want to improve relations” with Russia.
Russia expels Western diplomats over Navalny rally
Russia's Foreign Ministry on Friday said it was expelling diplomats from Sweden, Poland and Germany for attending a rally in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Moscow court orders Kremlin foe Navalny to prison
A Moscow court on Tuesday ordered Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to prison for more than 2 1/2 years on charges that he violated the terms of his probation while recuperating in Germany from nerve-agent poisoning, a ruling certain to ignite more protests across the country.