Vladimir Putin will come face-to-face with his fifth US president when he meets Joe Biden in Geneva today. Those hopes were dashed long ago, and relations have been rocky since Putin’s authoritarian turn in the mid-2000s. In recent weeks Russian hackers have been blamed for a series of cyber-attacks on US targets. Overall, however, the goal will simply be to establish some stability in a high-stakes relationship fraught with mutual distrust. With Russian-American relations at their lowest point since the fall of the Soviet Union, even that is an ambitious aim.

Source: The Irish Times June 15, 2021 18:56 UTC