Putin, Biden talk but achieve little
A four-hour meeting, still no plan to mend strained relationship
Ahighly anticipated first summit between President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin of Russia ended early yesterday and was described by both sides as a series of polite but adamantly stated disagreements about which country is the greater force of global disruption.
After four hours of talks, the two leaders emerged, separately, and offered professional respect for each other, like two skilled boxers describing the other’s prowess.
Both expressed a desire for a better relationship, but announced no dramatic actions to arrest the downward spiral that has already hurtled them toward the worst US-Russian tensions since the Cold War.
In duelling news conferences on the edge of Lake Geneva, a traditional site for two of the world’s most powerful antagonists to discuss their differences, the two leaders committed to the creation of working groups to deal with urgent issues, starting with arms control and the proliferation of cyber attacks. They agreed to send ambassadors back to each other’s capitals and expressed interest in working in areas of mutual interest, from the Arctic to Afghanistan.
“There has been no hostility,” Putin said, speaking about the meeting.
Biden declared “I did what I came to do,” including laying out a series of warnings and red lines he insisted were not “threats”.
Biden emerged offering some modest optimism that the US has restored its alliances with Europe and has made Putin more cautious about any actions regarded as being against American interests.
“I think the last thing he wants now is a Cold War,” Biden said, describing Putin as the struggling leader of a declining economy who was worried about the growth of an expansionist, aggressive China on his border.
But Biden also said he had handed the Russian leader a list of 16 examples of “critical infrastructure”, and had made clear that if they were attacked, “we have significant cybercapabilities” and would respond “in a cyberway”.
Biden said there had been no hyperbole and no talk of military intervention in their exchanges, which he described as “simple assertions”. But his warning that accelerating Russian cyberoperations would get an in-kind response could signal a significant escalation in the daily cyberconflict now underway among major and lesser powers, including China, Iran and North Korea.
Putin, for his part, denied Russia had been responsible for the range of attacks on the United States. His denial seemed to include both the sophisticated attacks like SolarWinds, revealed last December, that US officials said had been launched from Russia’s premier intelligence agencies, and ransomware attacks that Biden has said came from criminals harboured on Russian soil.
In his news conference, Putin turned the accusations back on Washington, asserting the US was responsible for a far larger number of malicious cybercampaigns.
He then refused to take any responsibility for human rights violations or the invasion of parts of
Ukraine, offering assertions about wanting a better relationship with the United States, but no assurances he would change Russia’s behaviour.
Asked about the imprisonment of political rivals, like Alexei Navalny, Putin said Navalny had broken the law. The Russian leader also engaged in familiar what-aboutism, referring to the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
By the end of the day, it was clear the two men had resolved few of their longstanding differences and kicked over several of them to working groups of senior officials.
The leaders also issued a joint statement promising to hold armscontrol talks and pledging that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. It was a statement that reached back 36 years, to a 1985 meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
But the contrasts between that session and this one spoke volumes. Reagan had famously called the Soviet Union the “evil empire”, but he and Gorbachev spent hours talking inside and outside, dined together, and tried to get to know each other. In the hours before Biden’s encounter with Putin, his aides made clear that they would not break bread, and that the meetings would be formal ones.
Biden seemed energised by the encounter, at one point taking off his jacket while answering a question at his news conference, and putting on his signature sunglasses to signal he was ready to wrap up a week-long trip through Europe and head home.
Yet at the end of the day it was unclear whether anything he saw or heard led to a revision of his view of Putin.
While the leaders retained their starkly diverging worldviews, there were moments they appeared surprisingly in sync. Putin called Biden “constructive, well-balanced and experienced”, and said he wanted agreements on “rules of behaviour” on sensitive subjects like nuclear weapons and cybersecurity — an echo of US hopes of finding “guardrails” for the US-Russian relationship.