Hyderabad: Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin of Russia spent more than three hours discussing issues on Wednesday at their summit in Geneva. Both leaders flew out of Switzerland after holding solo news conferences as security was tight and access extremely limited to areas around the summit site.
During the pressers, Biden and Putin agreed to return their respective ambassadors to Washington and Moscow in a bid to improve badly deteriorated diplomatic relations between their countries amid a row after Biden called Putin a 'killer' in a television interview and imposed new sanctions on Russia over its treatment of opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
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According to a landmark US intelligence report, Biden in an interview said that Putin 'will pay a price' for his efforts to undermine the 2020 presidential election in favour of former President Donald Trump. When asked if he thought Putin was 'a killer', Biden responded: "Mhmm. I do." Russia reacted angrily towards Biden by calling the comment unprecedented and describing the relationship between the two countries as "very bad."
Putin also responded to President Biden’s description of him as a killer by citing America’s past and present troubles, from slavery and the slaughter of Native Americans to racial injustice. Putin said that Biden's remark reflected the United States’ own problems. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on March 18 said that Biden had no regrets about his comments. "Nope. The President gave a direct answer to a direct question," she said.
"President Biden has known President Putin for a long time, they have both been on the global stage for a long time worked through many iterations of a relationship between the United States and Russia. And he believes we can continue to do that," she added. On the other hand, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also slammed Biden's remarks, telling reporters that "there has not been anything like this in history", mentioning that Biden does not want to improve relations with Russia.
"These are very bad statements by the President of the United States. He definitely does not want to improve relations with us, and we will continue to proceed from this," Peskov said. "The most important thing for us is to identify ways of rectifying Russia-US relations, which have been going through hard times as Washington has, as a matter of fact, brought them to a blind alley. We are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations if the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this," read the Russian foreign ministry's statement while inviting its US Ambassador back to Moscow to discuss Russia-US relations.
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Ahead of his meeting with Biden in Geneva, Putin said that he is not worried about being called "killer" by his US counterpart Joe Biden. "Over my tenure, I've gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretext and reasons and of different calibre and fierceness and none of it surprises me," US broadcaster NBC quoted Putin as saying in an interview. According to the channel, Putin called the "killer" label "Hollywood macho."
Speaking at a news conference after a summit with Biden in Geneva, the Russian President informed that the US President had phoned him to explain why he had called him 'a killer' in March and that the explanation he had offered had satisfied Putin. "President Biden phoned me afterwards and we exchanged views on the subject. These explanations suited me," Putin told media.
Pointing out numerous human rights violations by the US authorities and accusing the US military of being responsible for the murder of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, Putin questions "Who takes responsibility for that? and who is the murderer?" Notably, a declassified report by US intelligence released in March stated that Russia and Iran undertook campaigns to influence the 2020 Presidential election, but intelligence agencies found no evidence that foreign actors tried to alter votes or other technical aspects of the voting process.
According to The Hill, the two foreign campaigns sought to influence the election for different results -- Russia, to promote Trump for the second term at the White House, while Iran went against him -- but among five key judgments outlined in the declassified report is that no foreign actor interfered in the 2020 voting process.
The report pointed out that a key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to "launder influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations" against Biden -- through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.
The summit also witnessed Putin's dominating role towards human rights concern following the Alexei Navalny case. Biden said he will continue to air with Putin concerns about basic human rights because it is a core tenet of what the United States stands for. Biden said he could not be president of the United States and not raise human rights issues during the summit with Putin. He mentioned the internationally publicized case of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Read:| Putin cites ills in US society after Biden’s killer remark
But Putin said Navalny got what he deserved when he was handed a stiff prison sentence. Navalny is Putin’s most ardent political foe. He was arrested in January after returning to Russia from Germany, where he’d spent five months recovering from nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian officials deny involvement in Navalny's poisoning. Navalny received a 30-month prison sentence for violating terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction he dismissed a politically motivated.
Apart from the Navalny case, many other incidents emerged in public highlighting Russia as a violator of human rights. According to another Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza, several attempts were made to kill him by poisoning. During the lab test, traces of mercury, copper, manganese and zinc were found in his body. In 2012, the body of a Russian citizen, Alexander Perepilichnyy, was found at his home in London. It is believed that he was given poison in tea as he helped a Swiss company investigating a Russian money-laundering case following which he came to England from Russia.
Ukraine's former President Viktor Yushchenko has also accused the Russian government of attempting his assassination. According to reports, during the 2004 presidential election, a poisonous substance was splashed on his face at an event. Yushchenko was in the fray against a pro-Russian candidate.
Former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in a London hotel by mixing poison in the tea. During the investigation, a poisonous substance named Polonium-210 was found in his tea. It is alleged that Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated at the behest of Putin. In 1978, during the Cold War, Bulgarian rebel Markov was killed with a poisonous tipped umbrella. Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were also given poison. However, Russia has been refuting all these allegations. Many such cases have also come to the fore during the Vladimir Putin era, due to which Putin is often accused of being a 'killer'.
Coming back to the Geneva summit of Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, Cybersecurity was another major issue which was discussed during the summit, however, no breakthroughs on this issue were announced, but the leaders agreed to at least talk about what has become a major source of conflict between the US and Russia. 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. He said the US presented Russia with 16 specific types of infrastructure, including energy, elections, banking and water systems, and the defence industry.
Read:| Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit
The agreement comes amid over 300 million ransomware attacks against US businesses and government agencies, including one in May that disrupted fuel supplies along the East Coast for nearly a week. The disruption was blamed on a criminal gang operating out of Russia, which does not extradite suspects to the US. Beyond the direct financial cost- estimated at $1 trillion globally- malicious cybercriminal activities undermine the foundations of trust in the digital age. Recent ransomware attacks, including attacks on the JBS Meat Packers, have also demonstrated the risk posed by cybercrime to critical infrastructures and public safety.
Other serious incidents include the SolarWinds intrusion discovered last year in which hackers, believed by US authorities to be Russian, penetrated multiple US government networks and prompted Biden to impose additional US sanctions against Russia.
(with inputs from agencies)
