GENEVA (AP) —Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin of Russia spent more than three hours discussing issues Wednesday at their summit in Geneva. They ticked through their respective lists so quickly and in such “excruciating detail,” Biden says, that they looked at each other and thought, “OK, what next?”
The most pressing issues the leaders discussed:
AMBASSADORS
Biden and Putin agreed to return their respective ambassadors to Washington and Moscow in a bid to improve badly deteriorated diplomatic relations between their countries.
Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, left Washington in March amid a row after Biden called Putin a killer in a television interview and imposed new sanctions on Russia over its treatment of opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
John Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, flew out of Moscow in April after public suggestions from Russian officials that he should leave to mirror Antonov’s departure.
Both ambassadors were present at Wednesday’s summit.
Putin also said the Russian foreign ministry and the U.S. State Department would begin consultations on other vexing diplomatic issues, including the closures of consulates in both countries and the employment status of Russian citizens working for U.S. missions in Russia.
A senior Biden administration official said Sullivan is likely to return to Moscow next week. A different senior administration official said both governments had begun discussing consulate and local staff issues and the hope was an agreement could be reached in the next two months.
Neither administration official was authorized to comment publicly by name and both spoke on condition of anonymity.
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CYBERSECURITY
No breakthroughs on this issue were announced, but the leaders agreed to at least talk about what has become a major source of conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
Biden said he and Putin agreed to have their experts work out an understanding about what types of critical infrastructure would be off-limits to cyberattacks. He said the U.S. presented Russia with 16 specific types of infrastructure, including energy, elections, banking and water systems, and the defense industry.
The agreement comes amid a flood of ransomware attacks against U.S. businesses and government agencies, including one in May that disrupted fuel supplies along the East Coast for nearly a week. The disruption was blamed on a criminal gang operating out of Russia, which does not extradite suspects to the U.S.
Other serious incidents include the SolarWinds intrusion discovered last year in which hackers, believed by U.S. authorities to be Russian, penetrated multiple U.S. government networks and prompted Biden to impose additional U.S. sanctions against Russia.
Biden said the U.S. and Russian governments would follow up on certain criminal cases, an apparent reference to cybercriminals operating with impunity from Russian territory.
Putin agreed there is mutual interest in the subject.
Biden also made an implicit threat against Russia, saying the U.S. has “significant cyber capability” it could use against Russia if it were to interfere with U.S. critical infrastructure.
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NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Biden and Putin instructed their diplomats to begin laying the groundwork for a new phase of arms control.
The “strategic stability dialogue” would be a series of discussions designed to set the table for a negotiation by sorting out what exactly should be negotiated. More broadly, it would aim to reduce the risk of war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
Biden said the goal is to work with Russia on “a mechanism that can lead to control of new and dangerous and sophisticated weapons that are coming on the scene now, that reduce the time for response, that raise the prospect of accidental war.” He said this was discussed in detail.
No date was announced for the start of talks.
The basic idea is to identify and sort out the many areas of disagreement over what a future arms control treaty should address. It also would address ways to avoid unintended or accidental moves that could trigger war.
Shortly after Biden took office in January, he and Putin agreed to extend until 2026 the New START treaty that limits long-range nuclear weapons. The challenge now is to work out what a potential follow-on pact would include.
The Russians insist it include defensive weapons, such as U.S. missile defense systems. The Americans argue that it should include so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by New START and of which the Russians have a far larger number deployed. It might also include new and emerging technologies such as hypersonic missiles and space weaponry.
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PRISONER EXCHANGE
Biden said he raised with Putin the plight of two Americans detained in Russia.
Putin had opened the door to possible discussions about a prisoner swap with the U.S. and said those conversations would continue. Biden said he would follow up, too.
The U.S. is holding two prisoners whose release Russia has sought for more than a decade, including arms trader Viktor Bout. The other is Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot who was extradited from Liberia in 2010 and convicted the next year of conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the U.S.
Biden said Americans Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed are being “wrongfully imprisoned” in Russia.
Whelan, who also holds Canadian, Irish and British citizenship, was arrested in Moscow in 2018, convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years. Whelan says he was just visiting Moscow.
Reed was convicted of assaulting a police officer while intoxicated and sentenced to nine years. Putin, in a recent interview with NBC News, called Reed a “drunk and a troublemaker.”
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HUMAN RIGHTS
Biden said he’ll continue to air with Putin concerns about basic human rights because it is a core tenet of what the United States stands for.
Biden said he couldn’t be president of the United States and not raise human rights issues during the summit with Putin. He mentioned the internationally publicized case of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
But Putin said Navalny got what he deserved when he was handed a stiff prison sentence. Navalny is Putin’s most ardent political foe. He was arrested in January after returning to Russia from Germany, where he’d spent five months recovering from nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian officials deny involvement in Nalvany’s poisoning.
Navalny received a 30-month prison sentence for violating terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction he dismissed a politically motivated.
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SYRIA
Biden pressed Putin to drop a push to close the last international humanitarian crossing into Syria, making clear the matter was of “significant importance” to the U.S.
No deal was reached to keep it open, however.
Russia is threatening to use its U.N. Security Council veto to close the aid route for millions of Syrians internally displaced by that country’s war.
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AFGHANISTAN and IRAN
Biden said Putin asked about Afghanistan and expressed a desire that peace and security be maintained there. Biden said he told Putin that a lot of that will depend on him, and that Putin indicated he was prepared to “help” on Afghanistan as well as on Iran.
Biden declined to go into further detail. Biden’s administration is mounting new efforts to get Iran to comply with the terms of a nuclear deal it had once agreed to before Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew the U.S. from the agreement the U.S. and other world powers struck with Iran in 2015.
Putin also talked about preventing a resurgence of terrorist violence in Afghanistan. Biden said it would be very much in Russia’s interest to not see that happen.
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GENEVA (AP) — President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin concluded their summit on Wednesday with an agreement to return their nations' ambassadors to their posts in Washington and Moscow and a plan to begin work toward replacing the last remaining treaty between the two countries limiting nuclear weapons.
But the two leaders offered starkly different views on difficult simmering issues including cyber and ransomware attacks originating from Russia.
Putin insisted anew that his country has nothing to do with such attacks, despite U..S. intelligence that indicates otherwise. Biden, meanwhile, said that he made clear to Putin that if Russia crossed certain red lines — including going after major American infrastructure — his administration would respond and “the consequences of that would be devastating,”
Will Putin change his behavior? Biden was asked at a post-summit news conference.
“I said what will change their behavior is if the rest of the world reacts” in a way that “diminishes their standing in the world," Biden said. "I’m not confident of anything. I’m just stating a fact.”
Both leaders, who have stirred escalating tension since Biden took office in January, suggested that while an enormous chasm between the two nations remains the talks were constructive.
Putin said there was “no hostility” during three hours of talks, a session that wrapped up more quickly than expected.
When it was over, Putin had first crack at describing the results at a solo news conference, with Biden following soon after. Biden said they spent a “great deal of time” discussing cybersecurity and he believed Putin understood the U.S. position.
“I pointed out to him, we have significant cyber capability," Biden said. "In fact, (if) they violate basic norms, we will respond. ... I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War.”
Putin noted that Biden raised human rights issues with him, including the fate of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Putin defended Navalny’s prison sentence and deflected repeated questions about mistreatment of Russian opposition leaders by highlighting U.S. domestic turmoil, including the Black Lives Matter protests and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Putin held forth for nearly an hour before international reporters. While showing defiance at queries about Biden pressing him on human rights, he also expressed respect for Biden as an experienced political leader.
The Russian noted that Biden repeated wise advice his mother had given him and also spoke about his family — messaging that Putin said might not have been entirely relevant to their summit but demonstrated Biden's “moral values.” Though he raised doubt that the U.S.-Russia relationship could soon return to a measure of equilibrium of years past, Putin suggested that Biden was someone he could work with.
“The meeting was actually very efficient,” Putin said. “It was substantive, it was specific. It was aimed at achieving results, and one of them was pushing back the frontiers of trust.”
Putin said he and Biden agreed to begin negotiations on nuclear talks to potentially replace the New START treaty limiting nuclear weapons after it expires in 2026.
Washington broke off talks with Moscow in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and its military intervention in support of separatists in eastern Ukraine. Talks resumed in 2017 but gained little traction and failed to produce an agreement on extending the New START treaty during the Trump administration.
The Russian president said there was an agreement between the leaders to return their ambassadors to their respective postings. Both countries had pulled back their top envoys to Washington and Moscow as relations chilled in recent months.
Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was recalled from Washington about three months ago after Biden called Putin a killer; U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan left Moscow almost two months ago, after Russia suggested he return to Washington for consultations. Putin said that the ambassadors were expected to return their posts in the coming days.
The meeting in a book-lined room had a somewhat awkward beginning — both men appeared to avoid looking directly at each other during a brief and chaotic photo opportunity before a scrum of jostling reporters.
Biden nodded when a reporter asked if Putin could be trusted, but the White House quickly sent out a tweet insisting that the president was “very clearly not responding to any one question, but nodding in acknowledgment to the press generally.”
Their body language, at least in their brief moments together in front of the press, was not exceptionally warm.
The two leaders did shake hands — Biden extended his hand first and smiled at the stoic Russian leader — after Swiss President Guy Parmelin welcomed them to Switzerland for the summit. When they were in front of the cameras a few minutes later—this time inside the grand lakeside mansion where the summit was held—they seemed to avoid eye contact.
For months, Biden and Putin have traded sharp rhetoric. Biden has repeatedly called out Putin for malicious cyberattacks by Russian-based hackers on U.S. interests, for the jailing of Russia's foremost opposition leader and for interference in American elections.
Putin has reacted with whatabout-isms and denials — pointing to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to argue that the U.S. has no business lecturing on democratic norms and insisting that the Russian government hasn't been involved in any election interference or cyberattacks despite U.S. intelligence showing otherwise.
In advance of Wednesday's meeting, both sides set out to lower expectations.
Even so, Biden said it would be an important step if the United States and Russia were able to ultimately find “stability and predictability" in their relationship, a significant goal for a president who sees Russia as one of America's crucial adversaries.
Arrangements for the meeting were carefully choreographed and vigorously negotiated.
Biden first floated the meeting in an April phone call in which he informed Putin that he would be expelling several Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions against dozens of people and companies, part of an effort to hold the Kremlin accountable for interference in last year’s presidential election and the hacking of federal agencies.
The White House announced ahead of the summit that Biden wouldn't hold a joint news conference with Putin, deciding it did not want to appear to elevate Putin at a moment when the U.S. president is urging European allies to pressure Putin to cut out myriad provocations.
Biden sees himself with few peers on foreign policy. He traveled the globe as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was given difficult foreign policy assignments by President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president. His portfolio included messy spots like Iraq and Ukraine and weighing the mettle of China's Xi Jinping during his rise to power.
He has repeatedly said that he believes executing effective foreign policy comes from forming strong personal relations, and he has managed to find rapport with both the likes of Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Biden has labeled an “autocrat,” and more conventional Western leaders including Canada's Justin Trudeau.
But with Putin, who he once said has “no soul," Biden has long been wary. At the same time, he acknowledges that Putin, who has remained the most powerful figure in Russian politics over the span of five U.S. presidents, is not without talent.
“He’s bright. He’s tough," Biden said earlier this week. “And I have found that he is a — as they say ... a worthy adversary."