Cautious Biden-Putin summit avoided 'hostility'

Steven Pifer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an analysis ahead of the summit that the meeting could set in motion a process to reopen serious US-Russian arms negotiations after a decade's absence, but genuine gains will come only well down the road.

"We will not know if today's meeting was a 'success' for many months," he said on social media on Wednesday.

"We shouldn't expect big breakthroughs," said Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), a Kremlin-aligned think tank, said before the summit. "The main thing is to stabilize a relationship that has hit a very low level."

Most Russian observers agree that the Kremlin does not relish the current chaotic relationship with Washington and will try in Geneva to restore a measure of stability to diplomatic ties.

"The Russian side doesn't want chaos, they don't want escalation. They want to reduce risks," said Kortunov. "I think there's a hope of re-establishing normal diplomatic relations, with the ambassadors returning to work. But this is where my expectations end. There are still huge areas of dispute."

"The Russian side wants to move towards a hostile but respectful relationship," said Vladimir Frolov, a former senior Russian diplomat and foreign affairs analyst. "They want things to be as they were under Brezhnev in the 1970s and 1980s. No one called each other names, there were no sanctions on individual politicians, and no one tried to topple the Soviet leadership by supporting the opposition."

Russia and the US share broadly overlapping agendas on a number of global issues, from opposing DPRK nuclear proliferation to backing a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan, said Frolov.

Another potential area of cooperation is the fight against climate change, a political priority for the Biden administration, said Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of R.Politik, a political consultancy firm.

"The summit might only be a starting point," she said. "More important is what happens after — whether Russia and the US are able to set up mechanisms for dialogue to continue working on this positive agenda."

The United States lost as much as Russia due to sanctions, and further sanctions after the summit will mean lost opportunity, Putin said.

Putin made the remark after the summit, saying that many US companies and people left Russia with a loss under the sanctions and "gave business to hands of their competitors from other countries".

"We talked about that. What was the purpose? There is no sense in that," Putin said.

The trade between the2 two countries in 2020 dropped by 9 percent to $23.8 billion, but the export and import flow surged by almost 16 percent year-on-year during the first four months of this year.

"If such a trend remains, I believe it will benefit everyone," Putin added.