Geneva:
President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin face off Wednesday at a tense Geneva summit, exactly where ghosts of the Cold War will hover more than modern day-day US issues about Russian cyber attacks and what the White House sees as a hazardous authoritarian drift.
The setting — a sumptuous villa overlooking Lake Geneva — could be picturesque, but a gruelling diplomatic face-off awaits.
Up to 5 hours of talks are planned, beginning at about 1:00 p.m. (1100 GMT), with no break for meals. Putin is due to arrive very first, then Biden, with Swiss President Guy Parmelin acting as host.
Asked if the two leaders may well share meals collectively, a staple gesture of goodwill in summit diplomacy, a senior US official mentioned no.
“There will be no breaking of bread,” he mentioned, speaking on situation of anonymity.
The option of Geneva, following lengthy US-Russian negotiations, recalls the Cold War summit amongst US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the Swiss city in 1985.
The villa, surrounded by lush lawns against a backdrop of mountains, was below intense safety. Grey patrol boats cruised along the lake front and heavily armed camouflaged troops stood guard at a nearby yacht marina.
This time, tensions are significantly less about strategic nuclear weapons and competing ideologies than what the Biden administration sees as an increasingly hostile, rule-breaking regime.
From cyber attacks on American entities and meddling in the last two US presidential elections, to human rights violations and aggression against Ukraine and other European nations, Washington’s list of allegations against the Kremlin runs lengthy.
Putin, nonetheless, comes to the summit arguing that Moscow is merely difficult US hegemony. It’s element of a bid to market a so-referred to as “multi-polar” world that has seen Russia and arguably even more strong US adversary China draw close.
Putin was to fly into Geneva from Moscow correct ahead of meeting the US president. Biden, ending an intensive very first foreign trip as president, arrived on Tuesday following summits with NATO and the European Union in Brussels, and a G7 summit in Britain.
Asked if he was prepared for Putin, Biden smiled and mentioned: “I’m always ready.”
– Optimism? ‘Not much’ –
In an interview with NBC, Putin scoffed at US accusations of dirty tricks abroad and authoritarian crackdowns at home.
As effectively as denying any connection to what the United States says are Russia-based hacking and ransomware gangs, Putin rejected obtaining any hand in the deaths of numerous of his opponents through two decades in energy.
Addressing one of the principal irritants in relations with Washington and with the European Union, Putin insisted he also could not be blamed for the close to-fatal poisoning and subsequent imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, one of the handful of remaining key opposition figures in Russia.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, told journalists in Moscow that the US-Russian relationship was “at an impasse”.
There is “not much” ground for optimism, he added.
Biden’s group likewise expects no “big set of deliverables,” the senior Biden official mentioned.
– ‘Worthy adversary’ –
Biden says his principal aim is merely to establish clear “red lines” for what the White House will no longer tolerate from Russia.
“I’m not looking for conflict,” he mentioned in Brussels following the NATO summit, but “we will respond if Russia continues its harmful activities”.
Biden, who had previously characterised Putin as a “killer”, upgraded the Russian leader to a “tough” and “worthy adversary”.
Going into the summit, Biden has emphasised that he has the backing of his Western partners.
Russia was one of the leading subjects at the NATO summit in Brussels, exactly where the defence alliance warned that Russian military develop-ups on the edge of eastern Europe “increasingly threaten the security of the Euro-Atlantic area and contribute to instability along NATO borders and beyond”.
But for all the rhetoric, the White House and Kremlin each say they are open to carrying out business enterprise in a restricted way. Officials point to the current extension of the New Begin nuclear arms limitation treaty as an instance of effective diplomacy.
According to Russian and US officials, one attainable child step may well be swift reinstatement of the two countries’ ambassadors, who returned home this year in response to tensions.
Officials from the two sides say Biden and Putin will initially huddle only with translators and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. They will then switch to a bigger format.
However, in contrast to in 2018, when Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump met Putin in Helsinki, there will be no joint press conference at the finish.
The US side clearly desires to keep away from the optics of obtaining Biden sharing that sort of platform with the Russian president.
In 2018, Trump triggered a stir by saying, as Putin stood beside him, that he believed the Kremlin leader more than his personal intelligence services when it came to accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election bringing Trump to energy.
()