Biden and Putin hold high-stakes Geneva summit

After the initial bilat with Presidents Biden and Putin and their top diplomats (Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov) the meeting will expand to include five officials on each side.

Biden will be joined by:

Biden has been in intensive preparations for several weeks and was scheduled to dine with his closest foreign policy hands — Blinken and Sullivan — on Tuesday night at his hotel in Geneva.

Officials are entering the talks with the expectation they could extend well past their allotted time.

A senior administration official noted the thorough negotiations over the structure of the Geneva sit-down included an agreement that there would be flexibility built into the day.

While officials are coy about where that flexibility may lead — if anywhere at all — a decision by Biden and Putin to meet one-on-one, or break out their advisers into separate sessions, may serve as a signal that areas of potential cooperation can be fleshed out or addressed in a more fulsome manner.

"We've agreed with the other side that there will be some flexibility just so that the leaders can make determinations about the best way to conduct their business," the official said.

UPDATE: This post has been updated to remove a photo of President Biden's Tuesday meeting with Swiss President Guy Parmelin.

US President Joe Biden has harbored a skeptical view of Russian President Vladimir Putin for decades.

After former President George W. Bush met with Putin in Slovenia in June 2001, Bush said he looked him in the eye and got "a sense of his soul." Biden, then a senator and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, responded to those comments by saying, "I don't trust Putin. Hopefully, the president was being stylistic rather than substantive."

Biden has taken a large coterie of aides with him on his first foreign trip. He traveled with Blinken aboard Air Force One to Cornwall, though the secretary of state departed early for Brussels on his own plane. Also on the trip are national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who has staffed Biden in summit sessions.

Senior West Wing advisers Jen O'Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon and Bruce Reed are traveling with Biden, as are press secretary Jen Psaki and communications director Kate Bedingfield.

A number of National Security Council officials are also on the trip, including NSC chief of staff Yohannes Abraham, deputy national security adviser Daleep Singh, NSC senior director of speechwriting Carlyn Reichel and senior director for Europe Amanda Sloat.

The Wednesday summit between Biden and Putin — and its anticipated outcome — was the subject of considerable conversation among other leaders gathering for a meeting of their own at NATO Headquarters on Monday.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Biden would "be taking some pretty tough messages to President Putin in the course of the next few days," a comment suggesting that he, too, had discussed the summit with Biden during their back-to-back days of receptions and sessions that he hosted on the first part of Biden's journey.

US officials have said that US President Joe Biden will raise human rights issues during his talks with President Vladimir Putin, but would not specify whether that will include a discussion of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

However, Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation’s Executive Director Vladimir Ashurkov said this morning that he hopes “there is movement on this issue.”

Navalny was imprisoned earlier this year by a Moscow court for allegedly violating the probation terms of a 2014 case in which he received a suspended sentence of three and a half years.

On June 9, a Moscow court ruled that two organizations linked to Navalny are "extremist" groups – forcing them to shut down and rendering their members ineligible to run in upcoming elections.

“It's not the first instance of pressure on our organization, on our activists,” Ashurkov said. “We have always regrouped so we’ve evolved, and we have found ways to fight this terror regime.”

Meanwhile, Navalny is feeling “much better” following his hunger strike, Ashurkov said Wednesday. “He’s now back to normal in terms of eating, even though his health issues still remain.” 

On Monday, Biden was asked what it would mean for the US-Russia relationship if Navalny were to die or be killed in prison.

"Navalny's death would be another indication that Russia has little or no intention of abiding by basic fundamental human rights," Biden responded. "It would be a tragedy. It would do nothing but hurt his [Putin's] relationships with the rest of the world, in my view."

Each nation has heaped praise on the other ahead of Vladimir Putin’s summit with US President Joe Biden this week. The Russian leader declared relations to be at an “unprecedentedly high level” in an NBC interview on Monday, while China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian proclaimed “our friendship is unbreakable” in a news briefing.

But their tactical alliance has taken on more urgency since Biden came into office with a pledge to assert US leadership on the world stage. Under Biden, Washington has repeatedly singled out the two nations as the biggest threats to the rules-based international order, as it rallies allies to unite in an apparent ideological battle between democracy and autocracy.

Over the past few days, discussions on how to counter the authoritarian actions of Russia and China were featured prominently in both the Group of Seven (G7) summit in England and the NATO meeting in Brussels.

Despite the appearance of unity between Russia and China, the potential for friction exists.

Firstly, trade relations between the two are deeply imbalanced. China is Russia's largest trading partner, while Russia is a far less significant trading partner to China. There could be geopolitical concerns too. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has expanded its economic influence in Central Asia, an area long deemed by Russia as its sphere of influence.

Observers have long seen growing Sino-Russian ties as a partnership of convenience driven by geopolitical and economic interests, after the two powers moved on from their past animosity. In the late 1950s, relations between Moscow and Beijing became strained, and were later characterized by deep mistrust, ideological disputes and border conflicts.

And now, in the absence of shared fundamental values, common ideologies and a formal military alliance, it remains to be seen just how deep and lasting their ties will be.

Editor's note: CNN will be launching the Meanwhile in China newsletter on June 21, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here and read the full story below:

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US and allies are pushing China and Russia closer together, but will their 'unbreakable friendship' last?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has left Sochi, Russia and is heading to his meeting with US President Joe Biden in Geneva, Switzerland, Russian state-owned broadcaster Russia 24 reports. 

His estimated time of arrival is 6:30 a.m ET, or less than 90 minutes from now.

US President Joe Biden does not plan to hold a joint press conference with Putin following the summit, choosing instead to speak to reporters solo.

Officials say Russia pushed for a joint press conference during negotiations about the summit. But the US resisted because they did not want to give Putin a platform like he had after a summit with former President Donald Trump in Helsinki.

Officials also said they were mindful of Putin's desire to appear like he'd gotten the better of a US president, and wanted to avoid a situation that devolved into a tit-for-tat playing out in public.

"This is not a contest about who can do better in front of a press conference or try to embarrass each other," Biden said on Sunday, explaining the decision.

Biden will meet with Putin in two sessions, one a smaller group and one with a larger contingent of aides, according to a White House official.

US President Joe Biden used time away from summit meetings on his European tour this week for intense preparations ahead of his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to officials, as he works to avoid the pitfalls his predecessors faced meeting with the Russian leader. 

Most of his formal meetings this week have started after noon, leaving his mornings free for consultations with advisers. He has held lengthy preparation sessions with senior officials, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, to discuss the wide range of issues he plans to bring up with Putin, from cyber to Syria to Ukraine. 

The President also asked foreign leaders at the G7, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for their input as he prepared for the meeting in Geneva, according to people familiar with the conversations. Putin even came up as a point of conversation during his tea with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle, Biden told reporters, saying she “wanted to know” about the Russian president. 

Given some NATO allies had expressed concern about the optics of Biden's summit with Putin, Sullivan said Biden would speak privately with leaders "about what he intends to talk to Putin about" during a summit of the defense alliance on Monday.

As Biden becomes the fifth straight American president with whom Putin has met, officials want Biden to be prepared for Putin’s tactics, including his well-known habit of turning discussions of Russia’s bad practices back on the United States. Biden has told aides he believes Putin will respond to directness during their talks, and wants to be ready to offer a frank message.

"He’s overprepared!" Biden's wife Jill exclaimed last week when asked whether her husband was primed for his meeting with Putin.

Along with Merkel, Biden has opened the door for input to other key allies in bilateral meetings and conversations on the margins over the last several days. The idea serves dual purposes, aides said: While Biden’s decades in foreign policy give him a self-assurance about his approach, he sees value in the views of others who have had similar meetings with the Russian leader.

Read the full story here.

The National Security Council’s Senior Director for Russia, Eric Green, laid out the planned agenda for the Biden-Putin summit earlier this month, emphasizing that the main goal for the meeting is to establish “very clear lines of communication” with Russia “starting at the presidential level.”��

Green said the agenda “will cover the waterfront,” to include future arms control arrangements, the recent ransomware attacks that the US believes have been carried out by criminal groups in Russia, climate change, and the Kremlin-imposed restrictions on the US diplomatic presence in Russia.

Biden and his aides will also “be advocating on behalf of” the American citizens currently detained by Russia, Green said, and will reaffirm the US commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty. The White House also wants to discuss areas of mutual interest in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Afghanistan and the Arctic, Green said.

“We are not interested in a reset nor do we want escalation with Russia,” Green said, adding that “this is a much different Russia” than it was back in the era of the Barack Obama-led reset in 2009. 

But Green said the administration also recognizes that some things have not changed since 2009, specifically the fact that Russia still has one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals. The country is also still a permanent member of the UN Security Council, “which means, whether we like it or not, we have to work with them on certain core challenges out there in the world,” Green said. 

 “But we have no illusions about what is happening inside Russia and we don’t see a lot of opportunities for real constructive engagement in a lot of areas,” he added.  

CNN's Kevin Liptak, Natasha Bertrand, Arlette Saenz and Betsy Klein contributed reporting to this post. 

US President Joe Biden convenes the highest-stakes talks of his long career Wednesday when he joins Russia's Vladimir Putin for a summit, an encounter set to test his decades of experience on the world stage and lay down an early marker of his diplomatic skills.

Depending on its outcome, the meeting could shadow Biden as he returns home to help revive his domestic agenda. He'll arrive to the 18th-century villa on Lake Geneva, a stunning summit site, bolstered by support from western allies he spent the past week consulting ahead of his face-to-face with the Russian President.

In Biden's telling, those leaders all backed him in his decision to meet Putin now, in the first six months of his presidency, before he's had a chance to fully formulate a Russia strategy.

"He's bright, he's tough, and I've found that he is, as they say when I used to play ball, a worthy adversary," Biden told reporters of Putin on Monday during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, where he solicited advice from fellow leaders with experience dealing with Putin.

Still, skepticism abounds that anything can be accomplished. At its worse, Biden's summit could provide elevated stature to a leader who appears intent on testing the limits of international norms and the willingness of the West to respond.

Expectations for the summit are also low among American officials, who have said since the encounter was first announced they didn't think anything concrete would emerge from it.

Read more about the meeting here.