President Biden’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday will be tense and tightly choreographed, with no planned “bread-breaking” – a sharp departure from the collegial, unwritten, unsupervised interactions between Mr. Putin and President Donald J. Trump.
One of the main topics of the Geneva meeting will be the future of the New Start Treaty, which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 nuclear missiles each, according to a senior administrative official who briefed reporters on the flight from Brussels.
Mr Biden plans to confront Putin, whom he has labeled a killer, about the recent ransomware attacks on US companies and government agencies, and he will demand that Moscow stop hosting criminal hacking groups operating on Russian soil. He will also outline responses in case the state or private hacks originating from Russia continue, the official said.
Mr Biden is also likely to bring up the imprisonment of Aleksei A. Navalny, the ailing opposition leader.
“Nothing is off the table,” said the official, who warned that the White House was “not expecting great results” from the meeting.
No meals are planned, so there will be “no bread breaking,” said the officer.
Mr Biden’s detailed itinerary – or even the very existence of a detailed public schedule at all – contrasts with Mr Trump’s undrawn talks with Mr Putin, which in 2017 included a long conversation with the Russian leader in Hamburg that was not disclosed was up after the fact.
On Monday, Mr Biden set a sober tone for the meeting, warning Mr Putin that the death of Mr Navalny, one of the Russian president’s fiercest opponents, would undermine Russia’s already strained relations with world leaders.
“Navalny’s death would be another indication that Russia has little or no intention of upholding basic human rights,” Biden said at a press conference after the NATO summit.
“That would be a tragedy,” he added. “I don’t think it would do anything other than hurt his relationships with the rest of the world and with me.”
