US President Joe Biden is set to hold his first summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on June 16 in Geneva. The meeting between the two countries’ leaders could be the most contentious since the Cold War ended three decades ago. It will be the US President’s first foreign trip since entering the White House.

The leaders will discuss the pressing issues and seek to restore predictability and stability to the US-Russia relationship.  Biden has already lined up grievances, complaints, and protests related to Russian activities abroad and Putin’s suppression of dissidents at home. Putin has shown no interest and has his own list of accusations about US actions in Europe and the Middle East.

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This summit meeting will be unlike Putin’s meeting with President Trump in 2018. Let’s recall some of the previous US-Russia summits between the leaders of the two powered countries and their decades of dominance on the global stage.

End of the Cold War 

Ronald Reagan had campaigned against the Soviet Union throughout his political career and called it the “Evil Empire,” at the same time he wanted to end the specter of nuclear war. In November 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev held their first summit in Geneva where no agreements were reached. 

In December 1987, toward the end of the cold war, the two nations once again engage on the issue of controlling nuclear arms stockpiles and testing. They signed the INF Treaty, an accord banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles which led to the destruction of 2,692 missiles by 1991.

George W Bush and Vladimir Putin

Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, US-Russia relations steadily worsened. Although it was an uneventful beginning to the new relationship between the leaders it was marked by personal rapport. Bush tried to bring Putin on the side but the pair’s relationship slowly soured over the eight years, when Bush was in office. 

Both the leaders held a formal summit in Slovakia in 2005, where they discussed democracy in Russia and Europe, the North Korean nuclear weapons program, and the regime in Iran. 

Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, Putin had steeped aside to comply with Russia’s two-term prudential limit and installed Dmitry Medvedev in his position. Medvedev did not have a formal summit with Obama until April 2010, when they sat down in Prague, where they signed a new START agreement aimed at limiting nuclear arsenals. 

According to the reports, Obama told Putin that he knew about the Russian interference in that years’ election campaign and told him to “cut it out.” Meanwhile, Trump’s attitude towards Russia seemed quite opposite to Obama’s, he saw the Russian as a group he could do business with.

Donald Trump and Putin

When Donald Trump became the President of the US, he and Putin held many conversations, beginning at the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany in 2017. The pair held their one formal summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018, where Trump defended Russia over the claims of contradicting US intelligence, saying Russia had no reason to meddle. He also blamed poor relations with Russia on past US administrations rather than Russia’s actions. 

Since then, Trump faced a barrage of criticism from both sides of the US political divide for his defense of Russia. At the end of the summit, Putin said that the ball was in Trump’s court and gifted him a World Cup football.

The Russian president has been in power since 2000 and will formally meet his fourth US President.