Analysis | Why did Biden meet Putin?

With the China challenge in the background, the Geneva summit suggests that policymakers in Washington have at least started thinking of Russia as a secondary challenge that needs to be tackled diplomatically

In 2011, Joe Biden, then Vice President in the Obama administration, visited Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Inside Mr. Putin’s office, Mr. Biden “held his hand a few inches from his nose,” he recalled later in a conversation with journalist Evan Osnos. “I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I am looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul’.” When Mr. Osnos, who has described this conversation in the book Joe Biden American Dreamer, asked if he said that to Mr. Putin, Mr. Biden replied, ‘Absolutely, positively”. In March 2021, after assuming the White House, He also said the Russian leader was “going to pay” for the “interference” in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Three months later, the same and sought a more predictable relationship between the “two great powers”.