WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed Tuesday to meet next month in Geneva, a face-to-face encounter the White House hopes will help bring some predictability to a fraught relationship that's only worsened in the first months of the Democratic administration.
The June 16 summit is being tacked on to the end of Biden's first international trip as president: He'll also visit Britain for a meeting of Group of Seven world leaders and attend a NATO summit in Brussels.
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The agenda is expected to include discussion of Russian action in neighboring Ukraine, this week's forced diversion of a Lithuania-bound flight by Russian-ally Belarus, efforts by both nations to stem the coronavirus pandemic and more. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said no preconditions were set for the meeting.
White House officials said Biden is looking to find some common ground with his adversary on the path forward.
The Kremlin, for its part, said the presidents will discuss "the current state and prospects of Russian-U.S. relations, strategic stability issues and the acute problems on the international agenda, including interaction in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and settlement of regional conflicts."
Biden first proposed the summit in a call with Putin in April as his administration prepared to levy a second round of sanctions against Russian officials during his young presidency. And the U.S. levied more sanctions last week on Russian companies and ships for their work on a European natural gas pipeline called Nord Stream 2. U.S. officials say the pipeline threatens European energy security, heightens Russia's influence and poses risks to Ukraine and Poland in bypassing both countries.
The White House has repeatedly said it is seeking a "stable and predictable" relationship with the Russians. At the same time, it has called out Putin on allegations that the Russians interfered in last year's U.S. presidential election and that the Kremlin was behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign in which Russian hackers accessed the networks of at least nine U.S. agencies.
The Biden administration has also criticized Russia for the arrest and jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and publicly acknowledged that it has low to moderate confidence that Russian agents were offering bounties to the Taliban to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
The Biden administration announced sanctions in March against several mid-level and senior Russian officials, along with more than a dozen businesses and other entities, over a nearly fatal nerve-agent attack on Navalny in August 2020 and his subsequent jailing. Navalny returned to Russia days before Biden's Jan. 20 inauguration and was quickly arrested.
Last month, the administration announced it was expelling 10 Russian diplomats and sanctioning dozens of Russia companies and individuals in response to the SolarWinds and election interference allegations.
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., criticized Biden's decision to meet with Putin as "weak." He raised concerns about Russia's treatment of Navalny and tepid response to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin ally whose country this week ordered the diversion of a Greece-to-Lithuania commercial flight in order to arrest a dissident journalist.
The senator also criticized Biden for sparing ally Germany sanctions over Nord Stream 2, adamantly opposed by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Psaki, the chief White House spokeswoman, pushed back against the criticism and said Biden saw the summit as "a moment of in-person diplomacy to convey areas where he has concern and look for areas of opportunity to work together."
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Lee, Alexandra Jaffe, Vladimir Isachenkov and Frank Jordans of The Associated Press.
