The only concrete agreements between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin were to start a new round of nuclear talks and to return ambassadors to their posts. These are both small but solid wins
JOE BIDEN was 12 in 1955 when Dwight Eisenhower sat down in Geneva with Nikita Khrushchev for the first bilateral summit between the leaders of America and the Soviet Union. The current American president was a 42-year-old senator working on arms control when Ronald Reagan sat on a sofa with Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time in the same city, taking what turned out to be the first step toward ending the cold war.
The summit was a departure from the psychodrama of Donald Trump’s relationship with Mr Putin. American diplomats shudder to recall a press conference in Helsinki at which Mr Trump said he had no reason to distrust Mr Putin. There was no joint press conference this time.
He is, rather, a product of the Soviet collapse. He presides over a kleptocratic regime dominated by violent security services. It is a regime that cares more about wealth than ideology, and is preoccupied with its own survival rather than a global contest with America, let alone the interests of the Russian people. It thrives on disorder. It has invaded neighbouring countries, poisoned its opponents, and waged cyber- and information warfare against the West.
A few weeks later Mr Putin massed a vast army on Ukraine’s eastern border. At the same time, he brought down the entire weight of his domestic-security apparatus to crush Mr Navalny’s movement and purge Russian politics of meaningful dissent. Some dissidents fled the country. Mr Putin suffocated the few remaining independent media outlets by labelling them “foreign agents”, thus scaring off advertisers.
Mr Putin has signalled that he, too, is interested in a “predictable and stable” relationship—by which he means that America should predictably stay out of Russia’s affairs and its backyard. In the hope of drawing his own red lines, he pre-empted the summit by outlawing Mr Navalny’s movement as “extremist”, threatening to annihilate Ukraine were NATO to move closer and backing Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, who last month hijacked a Ryanair flight in order to arrest an opponent.
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