US president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin spent more than three hours in talks at their summit in Geneva on Wednesday. They ticked through their respective lists so quickly and in such “excruciating detail,” Biden said, that they looked at each other and thought, “OK, what next?”.
The optics
The meeting, unlike more traditional bilateral engagements of both leaders, did not come with the usual pomp and show of friendship or camaraderie.
There were no ‘hugs or punches’ as the Associated Press noted.
Instead, Putin’s first summit with the fifth US president of his tenure, Joe Biden, was about mutual respect, and the meeting in Geneva could, both of them said, lead to a more predictable, if still tense, relationship. In contrast to his predecessors, Biden made no suggestion that he expected to reset the relationship and he has already piled pressure on Russia over concerns including alleged election meddling, attacks by cybercriminals against the Colonial Pipeline and other US infrastructure and over the poisoning and jailing of dissident Alexei Navalny. But after earlier remarks that included calling Putin “a killer,” Biden on the eve of the summit described the Russian leader as “a worthy adversary” and at a news conference afterwards said that they would see where they had common interests. On the other hand, Putin, who at his 2018 summit with Donald Trump in Helsinki was widely seen as dominating the reality television star turned president, called Biden “a very experienced politician” who was able to speak in rare detail in the “very constructive” more than three hours of talks. Aside from this, Biden gifted Putin with a pair of custom aviator sunglasses. Biden is so known for wearing aviator shades that he’s sometimes parodied over them. He notably kept wearing his aviators while meeting Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on Sunday. The custom aviators are a brand manufactured in Massachusetts and designed for fighter pilots, the White House said, announcing the gifts after Biden and Putin concluded their summit in Geneva on Wednesday. The US leader also gave Putin a crystal sculpture of an American bison made by a New York-based glass company.
The Kremlin has not said whether and how Putin may have reciprocated.
The most pressing issues the leaders discussed:
Thawing diplomatic ties
Biden and Putin agreed to return their respective ambassadors to Washington and Moscow in a bid to improve badly deteriorated diplomatic relations between their countries. Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, left Washington in March amid a row after Biden called Putin a killer in a television interview and imposed new sanctions on Russia over its treatment of Opposition figure Alexei Navalny. John Sullivan, the US ambassador to Russia, flew out of Moscow in April after public suggestions from Russian officials that he should leave to mirror Antonov’s departure. Both ambassadors were present at Wednesday’s summit. Putin also said the Russian foreign ministry and the US state department would begin consultations on other vexing diplomatic issues, including the closures of consulates in both countries and the employment status of Russian citizens working for US missions in Russia. A senior Biden administration official said Sullivan is likely to return to Moscow next week. A different senior administration official said both governments had begun discussing consulate and local staff issues and the hope was an agreement could be reached in the next two months. Neither administration official was authorized to comment publicly by name and both spoke on condition of anonymity.
Cybersecurity
No breakthroughs on this issue were announced, but the leaders agreed to at least talk about what has become a major source of conflict between the US and Russia. Biden said he and Putin agreed to have their experts work out an understanding about what types of critical infrastructure would be off-limits to cyberattacks. He said the US presented Russia with 16 specific types of infrastructure, including energy, elections, banking and water systems, and the defence industry. The agreement comes amid a flood of ransomware attacks against US businesses and government agencies, including one in May that disrupted fuel supplies along the East Coast for nearly a week. The disruption was blamed on a criminal gang operating out of Russia, which does not extradite suspects to the US. Other serious incidents include the SolarWinds intrusion discovered last year in which hackers, believed by US authorities to be Russian, penetrated multiple government networks and prompted Biden to impose additional sanctions against Russia. Biden said the US and Russian governments would follow up on certain criminal cases, an apparent reference to cybercriminals operating with impunity from Russian territory. Putin made no promises at his news conference on cybercrime, appearing to deny Russian involvement, agreed there is mutual interest in the subject. Biden also made an implicit threat against Russia, saying the US has “significant cyber capability” it could use against Russia if it were to interfere with US critical infrastructure.
Nuclear weapons
Biden and Putin instructed their diplomats to begin laying the groundwork for a new phase of arms control. The “strategic stability dialogue” would be a series of discussions designed to set the table for a negotiation by sorting out what exactly should be negotiated. More broadly, it would aim to reduce the risk of war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Biden said the goal is to work with Russia on “a mechanism that can lead to control of new and dangerous and sophisticated weapons that are coming on the scene now, that reduce the time for response, that raise the prospect of accidental war.” He said this was discussed in detail. No date was announced for the start of talks. The basic idea is to identify and sort out the many areas of disagreement over what a future arms control treaty should address. It also would address ways to avoid unintended or accidental moves that could trigger war. Shortly after Biden took office in January, he and Putin agreed to extend until 2026 the New START treaty that limits long-range nuclear weapons. The challenge now is to work out what a potential follow-on pact would include. The Russians insist it includes defensive weapons, such as U.S. missile defense systems. The Americans argue that it should include so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by New START and of which the Russians have a far larger number deployed. It might also include new and emerging technologies such as hypersonic missiles and space weaponry.
Prisoner exchange
Biden said he raised with Putin the plight of two Americans detained in Russia. Putin had opened the door to possible discussions about a prisoner swap with the US and said those conversations would continue. Biden said he would follow up, too. The US is holding two prisoners whose release Russia has sought for more than a decade, including arms trader Viktor Bout. The other is Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot who was extradited from Liberia in 2010 and convicted the next year of conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the US. Biden said Americans Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed are being “wrongfully imprisoned” in Russia. Whelan, who also holds Canadian, Irish and British citizenship, was arrested in Moscow in 2018, convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years. Whelan says he was just visiting Moscow. Reed was convicted of assaulting a police officer while intoxicated and sentenced to nine years. Putin, in a recent interview with NBC News, called Reed a “drunk and a troublemaker.”
Human rights
Biden said he’ll continue to air with Putin concerns about basic human rights because it is a core tenet of what the United States stands for. Biden said he couldn’t be President of the United States and not raise human rights issues during the summit with Putin. He mentioned the internationally publicised case of jailed Russian dissident Navalny and Putin’s most ardent political foe. But Putin said Navalny got what he deserved when he was handed a stiff prison sentence. He was arrested in January after returning to Russia from Germany, where he’d spent five months recovering from nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian officials deny involvement in Nalvany’s poisoning. Navalny received a 30-month prison sentence for violating terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction he dismissed a politically motivated.
Syria
Biden pressed Putin to drop a push to close the last international humanitarian crossing into Syria, making clear the matter was of “significant importance” to the US No deal was reached to keep it open, however. Russia is threatening to use its UN Security Council veto to close the aid route for millions of Syrians internally displaced by that country’s war.
Afghanistan and Iran
Biden said Putin asked about Afghanistan and expressed a desire that peace and security be maintained there. Biden said he told Putin that a lot of that will depend on him, and that Putin indicated he was prepared to “help" on Afghanistan as well as on Iran. Biden declined to go into further detail. Biden’s administration is mounting new efforts to get Iran to comply with the terms of a nuclear deal it had once agreed to before Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew the US from the agreement it and other world powers struck with Iran in 2015. Putin also talked about preventing a resurgence of terrorist violence in Afghanistan. Biden said it would be very much in Russia’s interest to not see that happen
How Biden’s predecessors handled Putin
As an article in The Washington Post puts it, George W Bush tried to get a “ sense of [Putin’s] soul .” Barack Obama engaged in a “ reset .” And Donald Trump maneuvered to bring Putin back into the Group of Eight (among other things ). But five US presidents (from both parties) that dealt with him looked the other way as the Kremlin leader went after Russian media and the political Opposition, rigged elections, oversaw a mammoth spiraling of repression, and challenged democracies all over the world. Former president Barack Obama infuriated Putin by calling Russia, which backs separatists in Ukraine, a “regional power” acting “not out of strength but weakness.” But Obama, like previous presidents, took office hoping to restore relations with Russia. George W Bush famously said after meeting Putin in 2001 that he could “get a sense of his soul.” Trump broke the mould by voicing admiration for Putin. After his 2018 summit in Helsinki, Trump drew criticism even within his own Republican Party when he appeared to take at face value Putin’s denial of election interference: even as Putin openly said he wanted Trump to be president. Biden in contrast had infamously called Putin a “killer” and someone “without a soul”. A piece of anecdote frequently repeated among Biden aides goes that Biden, in his first encounter with Putin, told him directly that Biden didn’t think Putin had a soul at all. Biden told The New Yorker that Putin seemed pleased by the assessment.
“We understand each other,” Biden said Putin told him.
His image as a notoriously direct and at times tactless administrator put him at an advantage. He labelled him a worthy adversary to show mutual respect but also drew clear lines by an implicit hint at US strength. According to an article in The Washington Post Biden had told his aides he believes Putin responds to signs of strength, something he feels is better conveyed in person rather than over the phone, according to people familiar with the conversation. He has held two phone calls with the Russian President that officials describe as direct: but without the type of personal interaction and body language derived from an in-person meeting. Republicans quickly attacked Biden over the Geneva summit, saying he should have been more confrontational. “Summits are about delivering results,” said Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “To learn there was no tangible progress made with Russia on any issue is both unfortunate and disappointing.” But Senator Bob Menendez, the Democrat who heads the committee, praised Biden for “bluntly speaking truth” to Putin. “This was a necessary reality check for Putin and a welcome departure from the past four years of Trump’s coddling of the Kremlin,” Menendez said. With inputs from AP and AFP