White House Announces Biden-Putin Summit For June 16 In Geneva
Michael Cantrell
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According to the White House, President Joe Biden will be holding a face-to-face summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin next month as tensions between the United States and Russia continue to escalate.
The White House has confirmed the date of the summit to be June 16. The meeting has been added on to the end of the president’s first international trip since taking office when he pays a visit to Britain for a meeting of Group of Seven leaders and Brussels for the NATO summit.
Biden first proposed a summit in a call with Putin in April as his administration prepared to levy sanctions against Russian officials for the second time during the first three months of his presidency.
White House officials said earlier this week that they were ironing out details for the summit. National security adviser Jake Sullivan discussed details of the meeting when he met with his Russian counterpart, Nikolay Patrushev.
The White House has repeatedly said it is seeking a “stable and predictable” relationship with the Russians, while also calling out Putin on allegations that the Russians interfered in last year’s U.S. presidential election and that the Kremlin was behind a hacking campaign — commonly referred to as the SolarWinds breach — in which Russian hackers infected widely used software with malicious code, enabling them to access the networks of at least nine U.S. agencies.
Biden and his administration announced there would be sanctions placed against several mid-level and senior Russian officials, along with over a dozen businesses and other kinds of entities, due to an almost fatal nerve-agent attack on opposition leader Alexei Navalny back in August of 2020. These sanctions were placed back in March of this year.
The administration also said that it would be booting 10 Russian diplomats and slapping sanctions on dozens of Russian companies and individuals over the SolarWinds hack and allegations of election interference.
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