If a US president meets with a “soulless murderer”, it can only be about the Biden-Putin summit. That’s how tough Joe Biden (78) described his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin (68) in a TV interview from March.
Just three months later, they both want to sit down together anyway. In genf. The summit of the two heads of state is already on June 16 – exactly two years and eleven months after the US-Russia summit of Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump (74) in the Finnish capital Helsinki. The White House announced on Tuesday that it wanted to restore “strategic stability and predictability” and talk about the “most important problems”.
Three topics are already on the agenda:
1. Disarmament
Shortly after Biden took office, the USA and Russia extended the nuclear disarmament treaty “New Start” for five years – together they own around 90 percent of the world’s total. However, a lot has changed since the negotiations in 2010; the contract does not cover new weapon technologies and space infrastructure for military purposes, for example. In addition, both heads of state are worried about the nuclear armament of other countries.
2. Ukraine conflict
Russia expert Tatiana Stanowaja from the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank observes that Moscow’s rhetoric towards Ukraine has softened – presumably because of the summit meeting with Biden.
“Putin now has something to lose, which makes him more cautious in his direct foreign policy,” said Stanovaya to Blick. “Moscow wants to restore access to two Russian diplomatic institutions in the US.”
In April, the Biden government expelled ten Russian diplomats and imposed sanctions on several dozen people and companies for the Kremlin’s interference in the 2020 US elections and hacker attacks on federal authorities.
3. Belarus crisis
Biden described the hijacking and arrest of the journalist Roman Protasewitsch (26) in Minsk as “a direct affront to international norms”. Because of the incident, Moscow-backed Belarus dictator Lukashenko is now the topic of the summit.
Political veteran Biden believes in dialogue – no matter how hardened the fronts are. A meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (71) in 2010 also testifies to this: Israel duped the USA on the day of Biden’s arrival with new settlement plans in East Jerusalem. Nevertheless, Biden (then Vice President Obama) refused to fly back straight away.
In Geneva, not only a US president and a Russian president meet, but also old friends. Even if the Kremlin is officially dampening expectations: with arms control, international security and the fight against terrorism, the two heads of state have a large number of common interests. Moscow also likes the fact that Biden has not imposed any sanctions to prevent the almost completed German-Russian pipeline Nord Stream 2.
He has already made it clear in his TV interview that Biden will still speak plainly.
Keystone
A conflict is best resolved on a neutral ground. Mikhail Gorbachev (90) – then General Secretary of the Communist Party, later President of the Soviet Union – and US President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) knew that in 1985: They also met in Geneva at the time to discuss nuclear disarmament and relations between to speak to the two countries. It was a turning point in the Cold War between the two superpowers, which Reagan had looked forward to as a “peace mission” and Gorbachev “without expectations”. In a joint final declaration, the two heads of state agreed on a compromise. And the central sentence that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” – the “balance of horror” that US President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) spoke of in his inaugural address.