Geneva:
President Joe Biden pressed Vladimir Putin at their summit Wednesday to replace the combustible US-Russian stand-off with a more “predictable” relationship amongst “two great powers” capable of agreeing to disagree.
The two leaders wrapped up their very first summit shortly just after 5 pm (1500 GMT), just after about 3-and-a-half hours of meetings at an sophisticated villa in Geneva.
They had been set to hold separate news conferences shortly just after the meeting ended.
At the start out early Wednesday afternoon, they shook hands, striking cautiously positive notes.
But Biden swiftly got to the point: his need to take US-Russian relations off their increasingly unstable trajectory, in which Washington accuses the Kremlin of every thing from meddling in elections to cyberwarfare.
“It’s always better to meet face to face,” he told Putin as they met in the villa’s library, with a globe placed amongst them.
“We are trying to determine where we have a mutual interest, where we can cooperate; and where we don’t, establish a predictable and rational way in which we disagree — two great powers,” Biden stated.
Putin noted that “a lot of issues” require addressing “at the highest level” and that he hoped the meeting would be “productive”.
Biden’s apparent give of an understanding — if not necessarily a friendly relationship — went a lengthy way toward what Putin is reportedly in search of: enhanced respect on the world stage.
The reference to the United States and Russia as “two great powers” was sure to please the Kremlin leader, who has dominated his nation for two decades, infuriating the West with invasions of Ukraine and Georgia, and normally brutal crushing of political dissent.
Cold War, new difficulties
Expectations had been low for something more than a modest thaw in relations.
Illustrating the frostiness, no shared meal was planned for the duration of the talks, also attended by the two countries’ foreign ministers and later by an expanded group of officials.
The option of Geneva recalled the Cold War summit amongst US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the Swiss city in 1985.
The summit villa, encircled with barbed wire, was below intense safety. Grey patrol boats cruised along the lake front and heavily-armed camouflaged troops stood guard at a nearby yacht marina.
But in contrast with 1985, tensions are much less about strategic nuclear weapons and competing ideologies than what the Biden administration sees as an increasingly rogue regime.
From cyberattacks 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 came to the summit arguing that Moscow is just difficult US hegemony — aspect of a bid to market a so-known as “multi-polar” world that has seen Russia draw close with the US’s arguably even more effective adversary China.
In a pre-summit interview with NBC News, he scoffed at allegations that he had something to do with cyberattacks or the close to-fatal poisoning of one of his last remaining domestic opponents, Alexei Navalny.
‘Worthy adversary’
Biden, ending an intensive very first foreign trip as president, arrived in Geneva just after summits with NATO and the European Union in Brussels, and a G7 summit in Britain.
While in Brussels, he stated he would detail his “red lines.”
“I’m not looking for conflict,” he stated, but “we will respond if Russia continues its harmful activities”.
However, Biden, who had previously characterised Putin as a “killer”, upgraded the Russian leader to “worthy adversary”.
And for all the rhetoric, the White House and Kremlin each say they are open to performing small business in a restricted way.
Officials point to the current extension of the New Get started nuclear arms limitation treaty as an instance of thriving diplomacy.
Unlike in 2018, when Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump met Putin in Helsinki, there was to be no joint press conference at the finish of the summit.
The US side clearly wanted to prevent the optics of obtaining Biden sharing that type of platform with the Russian president.
In 2018, Trump brought on 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.
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