Biden got what he wanted from Putin in Geneva

Joe Biden’s performance following his three-hour talk with Vladimir Putin in Geneva marked a strange victory. His peculiar mixture of optimism, belief in the rules-based order, and utter realism seemed to floor the assembled journalists at the concluding news conference. Intent on scoring points, they couldn’t lay a glove on the veteran politician.

So much so that a star correspondent of CNN, Kaitlin Collin, finally blew up and accused the President of unwarranted optimism. Biden had already explained to her that he didn’t expect a change in behaviour from the Russians – “what will change their behaviour is if the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world.”

Collins didn’t give up, and asked Biden again to justify his rosy outlook. “If you don’t know that,” he replied. “You are in the wrong business.”

Just before taking the steps into Air Force One, he apologised. “I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.”

The whole episode suggests that Biden had achieved much of what he intended, whatever the commentators may say. The media circus seems to have got in the way of the real significance of the encounter by the lake.

It was never going to be a meeting of minds – but it was an exercise in setting out the ground on the substance and manner of how the American-Russian relations and dealings unfold for the rest of the decade. It could be summed up as a list of chapter headings, and some blank pages to be filled in.

Biden set out to explain that the US and its allies believed in a rules-based world order. He set out a series of red lines, as Putin explained in his press conference – most involving subversion, election interference, and cyber-attacks. Biden said he would retaliate to aggressive action – but avoided making specific threats.

Both men exuded chilly cordiality in their news conferences, with occasional gestures of respect. Putin outlined new areas of Russian global activity, with which the US might be invited to participate – for instance in opening up the Arctic and working on mitigating climate change.

But, the Russian leader stressed, his country’s sovereign rights had to be respected, particularly in terms of territorial coastal waters and the “interior seas”. Most of the six areas he specified were in the Arctic and Pacific regions. One might wonder, however, if he now included large areas of the Black Sea, especially the Sea of Azov, as sovereign Russian water to which Moscow would concede no rights of international navigation.

“Area Denial” and “Area Access” restrictions are part of new Russian military doctrine. They are invoked in the Black Sea, the east of the Baltic and even the eastern Mediterranean coastal waters off the new Russian bases at Tartus and Latakia in Syria.

The most likely immediate flashpoint is Ukraine. We know it was discussed, though not the exact terms. In his news conference Putin insisted that the government in Kiev was illegitimate – arrived at “from a coup in 2014” – and he now wanted the terms of the Minsk agreement of 2015 implemented in full. The sense of grievance can only have been aggravated by the mention in the recent Brussels Nato summit recognising Ukraine’s aspiration to join Nato.

Almost every negative, however, was balanced by a positive. While Putin rejected any suggestion of nefarious cyber activity, he did welcome cooperation on the extension of the START II strategic arms reduction talks and treaties. He thanked the US for agreeing another five-year extension to the current agreement – even suggesting that they return to other arrangements ripped up by Trump such as the Open Skies treaty. He seemed to suggest it was time to go back to better regulation of arms development.

This may be a result of the severe jolt Russia received from the war in Nagorno Karabakh in the South Caucasus last year. Moscow was caught on the hop by the speed with which one of the frozen conflicts on its borders suddenly became unfrozen. Now the Russians are cast as peacekeepers between two allies and former members of the Soviet Union. The other big surprise was the adroitness with which the Azeris had used new tactical weapons such as drones and loitering munitions, supplied by Turkey and Israel.

The elephant in the room, or the grey rhino in more contemporary jargon, is China. Russia is desperate to get China into strategic, long-range nuclear weapons reduction talks in the START process. So far it has failed spectacularly, and wants American help to bring China into the talks.

Similarly, China’s interest in the High Arctic and its move into Europe are of huge concern, though hardly stated publicly at Geneva. Putin, the master of diplomatic unpredictability, fears he is being beaten at his own game by Beijing. Russia fears becoming very much the junior partner in its alliance with China. China, too, is an increasing source of pressure as migration of poor farmers from China into newly cultivated wilderness and tundra in the far east of the Russian Federation gathers pace.

There was a comfortable familiarity in the way the two leaders approached each other. Two experienced grandmasters getting down to the game of chess, whose rules and rituals they know and love – and such a relief after the wild psych-bingo of Donald Trump.

Their game is played with nuance and guile. For all the rejection of charges of foul play in the cyber sphere, there was a sense that both recognised that cyber had become a Frankenstein’s monster. Putin recognised Biden’s request for a list of some 16 civil targets to be put “off limits” for cyber-attacks in terms guaranteed by international convention. This might include utilities for water and electricity supply, vital for life and health, medical facilities, hospitals and clinics – such as those targeted by the North Korean Wannacry ransomware attack of four years ago. The ransom attacks are not so much the work of mafia states, but mafias with all the subversive firepower of small states. Ransomware today is what the kidnapping industry was a generation ago, only many times more lucrative.

Putin’s particular red line of the moment was Russia’s internal politics and the politics and mores of its neighbourhood, e.g. Belarus. Alexei Navalny is a traitor, pure and simple, he said, and did not commit to his safety in jail being guaranteed. Putin seemed a bit smug when talking about his own country – as if the fears of setbacks caused by Covid and street protests had rolled away. He is set fair, was the subliminal message, for sweeping victory when the Duma, the lower house, comes up for election this September.

China, and Covid for the most part, were the great unmentionables – the blank pages to be filled in. So, too, is climate change – though the two leaders did make a vague gesture towards possible future cooperation in research.

The two chess masters didn’t seem over keen to set a date for the next encounter. This may be because of the big unmentionable, the grey rhino, that is about to hit them very soon: Iran. Within the next two days we will know if the allies and partners, including Russia and America, can successfully revive the JCPOA, the 2015 arms deal canned by Trump three years ago. In a week Iran will elect a new president, the hardliner Ebrahim Raisi. For Russia, Iran is the awkward ally par excellence in Syria and Iraq – and the most unpredictable foe of US regional interests across the Gulf and Middle East.

An unforeseen upset in Tehran could find Mr Biden and Mr Putin in urgent and serious conversation very soon.