President Biden will meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Geneva on June 16, the White Home stated Tuesday, the primary face-to-face sessi
President Biden will meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Geneva on June 16, the White Home stated Tuesday, the primary face-to-face session between the 2 leaders at a time of extraordinary rigidity over Ukraine, cyberattacks and a raft of latest nuclear weapons Mr. Putin is deploying.
The assembly is anticipated to focus closely on stopping nuclear escalation. Geneva was additionally the positioning of the 1985 summit between Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet chief, and Ronald Reagan, additionally targeted on the nuclear arms race.
However Mr. Biden can be anticipated to make use of the summit to boost the problems he talked about with Mr. Putin on the phone not too long ago, simply earlier than the USA introduced a brand new collection of economic sanctions towards Russian officers and monetary establishments.
These embrace the prosecution and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition chief that Mr. Putin’s intelligence providers tried to kill with a nerve agent. And Mr. Biden plans to concentrate on the rising tide of cyberattacks directed at the USA, beginning with SolarWinds, a complicated entry into community administration software program utilized by many of the United States’ largest firms and by a spread of presidency companies and protection contractors.
Two weeks in the past Mr. Biden stated he would increase with Mr. Putin the more moderen ransomware assault on Colonial Pipeline, which shut down practically half the provision of gasoline, diesel and jet gas to the East Coast. That assault arose from a legal group, however Mr. Biden accused Russia of harboring the ransomware criminals.
For Mr. Biden, the encounter will come after two successive conferences with allies, first the Group of seven allies — a gaggle the Russians had been a part of for a number of years when integration with the West appeared attainable — and NATO allies. Mr. Biden will then journey from Brussels, the place NATO is headquartered, to Geneva, the place his nationwide safety adviser, Jake Sullivan, met his Russian counterpart final weekend to plan the assembly of the 2 world adversaries.
For all of the tensions, Mr. Biden has repeatedly stated that the USA and Russia should discover a option to have a “secure, predictable” relationship.