Joe Biden meets with Vladimir Putin in first in-person summit

This week, US President Joe Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin for their first in-person summit in Geneva, Switzerland. Following the meeting between the two leaders, Biden said he did what he came to do.

Following the G7 and the NATO summits, Biden went to Geneva for his first in-person meeting with Putin. This marks the first time Biden would meet with the Russian leader as the US President, having previously met with him before during his vice presidency. Speaking with the reporters after their three-hour meeting, Biden said that they remain on opposite ends when it came to world issues like espionage and human rights.

“The bottom line is I told President Putin that we need to have some basic rules of the road that we can all abide by,” said Biden.

“It was important to meet in person so there could be no mistake about or misrepresentations about what I wanted to communicate. I did what I came to do,” added the US leader.

Biden and Putin called the meeting to talk about the issues that have caused a strain on US-Russia relations. The issues ranged from cyberattacks on US federal agencies, Moscow’s crackdown towards Russians who support democracy to Russia’s increasing threat to NATO allies following the heightened tensions at the border it shares with Ukraine.

Prior to the meeting, Putin told reporters in a sign that seemed to indicate that they were looking to ease the tensions between the two countries, that both the US and Russia would have their ambassadors return to their posts in Washington and in Moscow. To note, there has yet to be a diplomatic representative in either country.

Previously, Biden called for world leaders to protect their countries from those who seek to cause division while pushing for populism. Biden added that it is up to democratic nations to prove that democracy can prevail while autocracies cannot meet the needs of the people. Biden’s remarks come after the NATO Summit that he attended in Brussels, Belgium, as he looks to re-engage the US with its allies and partners in the alliances.