Moscow, Russia — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday praised the outcome of his summit with U.S. President Joe Biden and called him an astute and shrewd negotiator.
The two
leaders concluded three hours of talks Wednesday at an opulent villa facing
Lake Geneva by exchanging expressions of mutual respect but firmly restating
their starkly different views on cyberattacks, the conflict in Ukraine,
political dissent and other issues. At the same time, they announced an
agreement to return each other’s ambassadors and mapped more talks on arms
control and cybersecurity.
Putin,
who hailed Biden as a highly experienced and constructive interlocutor at a
news conference in Geneva, offered more praise of the U.S. leader on Thursday
in a video call with graduates of a government management school.
Biden
kept him on his guard with his savvy negotiating skills, Putin said.
“He
perfectly knows the matter,” Putin said. “He is fully concentrated and knows
what he wants to achieve. And he does it very shrewdly.”
He
dismissed what he described as media attempts to cast Biden as physically
frail, noting that the 78-year-old U.S. president was in great shape even
though the meeting wrapped up a European tour for him that included the G-7 and
NATO summits.
“He was
on a long trip, he flew in from across the ocean, involving jetlag,” the
68-year-old Putin said, adding that he knows how tiring travel can be.
“The
atmosphere was quite friendly,” he added. “I think we managed to understand
each other, we managed to understand each other’s positions on key issue, they
differ on many things and we noted the differences. At the same time, we
established areas and points where we can possibly bring our positions closer
in the future.”
Putin
particularly emphasized the importance of an agreement to conduct dialogue on
cybersecurity between experts, saying it would help reduce tensions.
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. The
agreement follows a flood of ransomware attacks against U.S. businesses and
government agencies that U.S. officials said originated from Russia.
Putin,
who has strongly denied any Russian state role in the cyberattacks, argued
Thursday that “instead of finger-pointing and bickering, we should better
combine efforts to fight cybercrime.”
Putin’s
spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the summit as positive and productive, saying
it allowed the leaders “to directly put forward their positions and try to
understand where interaction is possible and where there can be no interaction
due to categorical disagreements.”
Peskov
particularly noted the joint statement from the presidents that said the two
countries will conduct a dialogue on strategic stability issues and reaffirmed
that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” — a principle
declared by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at
their Geneva summit in 1985.
Restating
the principle was a “significant achievement” amid current tensions between
Moscow and Washington, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who
attended the talks.
The
strategic stability dialogue would cover a wide range of issues related to
nuclear and other weapons and is key to reducing the risk of conflict between
the two superpowers.
The
talks follow a decision this year to extend the New START, the last remaining
U.S.-Russian arms control pact and would be aimed at working out a follow-up
agreement after it expires in 2026.
The
negotiations will be complex and strenuous. The U.S. is worried about new
destabilizing weapons developed by Russia, such as the atomic-powered,
nuclear-armed Poseidon underwater drone, while Russia wants to include U.S.
missile defense and potential space-based weapons in an agreement.
“It’s a
difficult task to conjugate the approaches and formulas,” Ryabkov said. “But we
are ready to try to solve it.”
Konstantin
Kosachev, a deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, hoped that
talks between experts would help reduce the bad blood.
“The
more often experts will meet, the less room the politicians will have for
speculation and manipulation,” he told The Associated Press.
The
decision to return the ambassadors, who left their posts amid the tensions, was
also widely billed by Russian officials and experts as an important move to
stabilize ties.
Russia
recalled its ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, for consultations in March after
Biden described Putin as a killer in an interview. John Sullivan, the U.S.
ambassador to Moscow, flew home in April after public suggestions from Russian
officials that he should leave to mirror Antonov’s departure.
U.S.-Russian
ties have plummeted to all-time lows after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of
Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, accusations of Russian interference in elections
and cyberattacks, and Western criticism of the Kremlin’s crackdown on the
opposition.
Biden
criticized the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and
other moves by the Kremlin to stifle dissent and independent media. Putin shot
back, keeping to his practice of never mentioning his chief political foe by
name, saying Navalny knew he was breaking the law and was duly punished. He
added that government critics designated as “foreign agents” were pursuing
malign Western interests.
In
comments posted to his Instagram account, Navalny denounced Putin’s comments as
lies.
“He just
doesn’t say a word of truth,” Navalny said. “Clearly, he just physically can’t
stop lying.”
Navalny
was arrested in January upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months
recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin — an
accusation that Russian officials reject. In February, Navalny was given a 2
1/2-year prison term for violating the terms of a suspended sentence from a
2014 embezzlement conviction that he dismissed as politically motivated.
Navalny’s
supporters held a protest in Geneva ahead of Putin’s visit and dotted the city
with billboards blasting the Kremlin for refusing to investigate his poisoning.
On
Ukraine, Russia reaffirmed its view that the country’s bid for NATO membership
represents a red line, while the U.S. has restated that the alliance’s doors
remain open for its membership.
Some in
Ukraine voiced hope the summit could help ease tensions that spiked this year
when Russia bolstered its forces near Ukraine.
“Reducing
the conflict potential in U.S.-Russian relations could help lower tensions on
our border with Russia,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Center think
tank.
But
independent Kyiv-based political expert Vadim Karasev warned of a danger that
the lack of resolution of the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in
Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland known as the Donbas would make it
frozen, and the country would steadily drift to the fringes of international
politics.
“The
results of the Putin-Biden meeting will cool Kyiv’s aspirations,” Karasev said.
“Ukraine won’t be able to quickly join NATO, and the conflict in Donbas will
become a chronic one. The Ukrainian issue will lose its acuteness, leaving Kyiv
on the periphery of the global agenda.”
Experts
say that sharp differences rule out any quick progress on the divisive issues.
“Confrontation
will continue, but there is a hope now that instead of being uncontrollable it
could become more orderly,” said Valery Garbuzov, the head of the U.S. and
Canada Institute, the government-funded think-tank.
***Associated
Press journalist Kostya Manenkov in Moscow and Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, Ukraine,
contributed.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-summits-d86605a1c60be7c9ca856028030b961b