(Carbis Bay) The White House announced on Saturday that US President Joe Biden will speak alone at a press conference following his meeting Wednesday in Geneva with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
“We hope this meeting will allow for frank and direct exchanges,” a US executive said.
For the White House, a “one-on-one” press conference is the “appropriate format” to present the topics that have been clearly raised, both about potential rapprochement and topics about which the United States has “real concerns.”
The US executive specified that the meeting would include a working session and a session in a smaller format, without further details on the latter.
For its part, the Kremlin indicated that Mr. Putin will also speak at the end of the discussions.
His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, simply stressed that the US president seemed to prefer this format, noting that he did not participate in a joint press conference during the G7 summit.
Ukraine, Belarus, Fate of imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, Cyber attacks: Discussions promise to be bitter and difficult. The White House has been hammering for several weeks that it aims to make relations between the two countries more “stable and predictable.”
The joint press conference that followed the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018 is still on everyone’s minds in Washington.
In a bizarre exercise that caused uproar even within his own camp, the Republican president seemed to attach more importance to the words of the former Soviet intelligence strongman than to the unanimous conclusions of US intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
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