U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin are to meet face to face for the first time since Biden became president in January.
The summit in Geneva, Switzerland is to take place after relations between the U.S. and Russia recently hit “rock bottom”, says Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served on the White House National Security Council under President Barack Obama. In the past year, the U.S. has issued sweeping sanctions on Russian officials over a long list of charges: election interference; persecuting activists and journalists in Russia, including the now-jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny; engaging in malicious cyber activities; bullying Ukraine and other actions. Russia, in turn, has criticized the U.S. for interfering in its domestic affairs and threatening international stability.
Putin’s meeting with Biden will undoubtedly be very different to the one he attended with former President Donald Trump in Helsinki in July 2018. Then, Trump declined to criticize Putin and openly dismissed U.S. intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Biden has pledged to take a tougher stance on Russia than Trump and will seek to restore “predictability and stability,” according to the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, in a May 25 statement.
Geneva was also the site of the first meeting between the U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, which helped to defuse tensions during the Cold War. Gorbachev, now 90 years old, told Interfax news agency on May 27 that “much has been destroyed in matters of strategic stability, now it is necessary to restore it.” He added that Biden was someone Russia “can negotiate with” and that the previous administration “turned out to be unreliable.”
What will Putin and Biden discuss in Geneva?
“A full range of pressing issues”, according to Psaki, from human rights issues to cyber attacks. The Kremlin, for its part, said the presidents would discuss “the current state and prospects of the 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.”
Ukraine will undoubtedly be on the agenda. Psaki said Biden will underscore support for the country’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Russia has been under U.S. sanctions over its annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014. Ever since, Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region have fought Kiev’s troops, with skirmishes breaking out periodically, sometimes intensely. In April, Biden called on Putin to “de-escalate tensions” after Moscow sent warships to menace Ukraine from the sea and sent tens of thousands of troops to gather at the border—the largest buildup since 2014.
Biden will also address Belarus’ forced landing of a Ryanair plane to arrest opposition blogger Roman Protasevich on May 23, Psaki said. The incident was widely condemned and some countries, including the U.K. and Lithuania, have decided to avoid Belarusian airspace. Putin, in a show of support for his ally Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, called the international response an “emotional outburst”.
The U.S. president has also said he will raise the issue of cyberattacks, after a spate of them on U.S. targets by Russian hackers. Biden pointed the finger at Russia for last year’s cyberattack against U.S. information technology firm SolarWinds, which compromised at least nine federal agencies and 100 Western companies.
But several prominent attacks have taken place more recently, many with Russian fingerprints on them; the Colonial Pipeline, America’s largest fuel pipeline, was taken down by cybercriminals in mid-May; on May 27, Microsoft revealed that a major cyber attack by Nobelium, the same group that U.S. says was behind SolarWinds attack, had targeted over 150 organizations worldwide. On June 1, the Brazilian meat production giant JBS, which provides much of the meat for north America, also said it was targeted by a ransomware attack originating from Russia.
Biden has said there was no evidence to link the Kremlin with the Colonial hack, but said Moscow needed to do more to deter attacks from within its borders.
Source : The National Interest
