Secretary of State Antony Blinken “will participate in President Biden’s bilateral meeting with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16,” State Dept. spokesman Ned Price said yesterday in a statement reported by TASS last night. This will be unlike the Trump-Putin summit, where the two heads of state deliberated with only their interpreters present. Would-be controllers were excluded.
Otherwise, if National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is taken at his word during a White House briefing yesterday, the U.S. administration does not intend to accomplish much at the Biden- Putin summit. Rather, the implied intention is for Biden to read the riot act to Putin. “The relationship between the United States and Russia is not about a relationship of trust. It is about a relationship of verification, a relationship of clarifying what our expectations are and about laying out – if certain kinds of harmful activities continue to occur – there will be responses from the United States,” Sullivan said. “We will lay those out for Putin in this meeting.” (Note, not Mr. Putin or President Putin.) Sullivan said that Putin will be able to “understand fully where the U.S. stands, and what we intend to do.”
Further, “We believe, fundamentally, that our capacity to ensure that harmful and disruptive activities against the United States do not continue unabated is to be able to communicate clearly, directly, not by negotiating in public, but by explicating our position and our capabilities in private,” Sullivan said.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov replied to all this by charging that tensions in Ukraine are the product of an irresponsible U.S. policy. “We proceed from the premise that tensions [in Ukraine] created from this irresponsible policy will persist,” he said. “I believe that it is an inevitable element of the American-Ukrainian attempts to demonstrate a high degree of mutual understanding. ... The content of the American policy towards Ukraine is clear to us, this policy contains no element of influence on Kiev in order to ensure at least minimal implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures by Ukraine. We state this with regret,” Ryabkov added.
