- President Joe Biden spoke on Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time as commander in chief.
- Biden put pressure on Putin on a number of topics, including interference in the Russian elections.
- The president promised to be more assertive with Putin than his predecessor, President Donald Trump.
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President Joe Biden spoke on Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone for the first time since his inauguration, raising a number of topics of concern for the United States, according to a reading of the White House call.
The president pressured Putin on “the SolarWinds hack, reports from Russia rewarding US soldiers in Afghanistan, interference in the United States elections in 2020, and the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny”. The Russian government has denied any involvement in the above issues.
Navalny, who is Putin’s most prominent critic, was recently arrested in Moscow after returning from Germany to Russia, where he was receiving treatment after being poisoned last August in Siberia. There were mass protests in Russia over Navalny’s arrest. The Biden government asked the Russian government to release Navalny and the people arrested in protest against his detention.
Biden in his connection with Putin also emphasized US support for Ukrainian sovereignty in the midst of Kiev’s ongoing war with Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, the reading said, as the two leaders discussed their willingness to extend the treaty on control of New START nuclear weapons for five years. They agreed to “have their teams work urgently to complete the extension” of the treaty by 5 February.
The new START limits the number of strategic nuclear warheads, missiles and bombers that can be deployed by each country. It is the only nuclear weapons control treaty between the United States and Russia, which has the largest nuclear arsenals in the world.
According to a summary of the Kremlin’s summons, Putin congratulated Biden “for the beginning of his term as President of the United States” and emphasized that normalizing relations between the United States and Russia would be in the interest of both countries and also the community. International.
“In general, the conversation between the Russian and American leaders was professional and sincere. They agreed to keep in touch,” said the Kremlin, echoing the White House’s claims that both sides would work to extend the New START.
The Kremlin reading did not mention the issues on which the White House said Biden expressed concern to his Russian counterpart.
Biden vowed to face Putin compared to Trump
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Biden promised to take a much more assertive stance with Russia than his predecessor. “Donald Trump continues to welcome Russia while Putin pursues civil society and journalists,” said Biden in an August 2020 tweet. “Unlike Trump, I will defend our democratic values and face autocrats like Putin.”
Former President Donald Trump has often been criticized by Congressional lawmakers, including Republicans at times, for being too soft on Russia.
The issue of interference in the Russian elections was a major thorn in Trump’s side during his presidency, and he frequently criticized Special Lawyer Robert Mueller’s inquiry into the matter. Mueller’s investigation also investigated whether the Trump campaign was coordinated with Russia and whether the president obstructed justice during the investigation.
The special council ended up refusing to explicitly accuse Trump of obstruction, but neither did he fully exonerate him. Mueller also did not find enough evidence to accuse the Trump campaign of conspiring or coordinating with the Kremlin, but concluded that the campaign received Russian interference in 2016.
In what was one of the most infamous moments of his presidency, Trump, in July 2018, seemed to side with Putin in the U.S. intelligence community on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The Trump administration was also slow to react to the poisoning of Navalny, and Trump, in an interview in July 2020, said he did not confront Putin because of the intelligence that Russia paid Taliban-linked militants to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.
The first time Trump was impeached in December 2019 was in connection with his efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to initiate investigations into Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, while retaining military aid to Ukraine amid ongoing conflict with the Russia.