President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia no longer has his ‘buddy’ Donald Trump to try and dance with….
Things will revert back to the old ways between the two old foreign affairs leaders who have sat down next each other in the past……..
President Biden will meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Geneva on June 16, the White House said Tuesday, the first face-to-face session between the two leaders at a time of extraordinary tension over Ukraine, cyberattacks and a raft of new nuclear weapons Mr. Putin is deploying.
The meeting is expected to focus heavily on preventing nuclear escalation. Geneva was also the site of the 1985 summit between Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, and Ronald Reagan, also focused on the nuclear arms race.
But Mr. Biden is also expected to use the summit to raise the issues he talked about with Mr. Putin on the telephone recently, just before the United States announced a new series of financial sanctions against Russian officials and financial institutions.
Those include the prosecution and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader that Mr. Putin’s intelligence services attempted to kill with a nerve agent. And Mr. Biden plans to focus on the rising tide of cyberattacks directed at the United States, starting with SolarWinds, a sophisticated entry into network management software used by most of the United States’ largest companies and by a range of government agencies and defense contractors.
Two weeks ago Mr. Biden said he would raise with Mr. Putin the more recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which shut down nearly half the supply of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to the East Coast. That attack arose from a criminal group, but Mr. Biden accused Russia of harboring the ransomware criminals….
image..Credit…Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via Shutterstock