Biden-Putin meeting won’t be ‘light-switch’ moment: Blinken

Bloomberg

President Joe Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin won’t be a “light-switch moment” but the start of a longer process aimed at establishing a more stable relationship, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Biden believes there are areas where the US and Russia can co-operate, Blinken said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” one of four scheduled talk-show appearances on Sunday.
But the US president will have to respond if Putin continues malign activity such as the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, cyber attacks, and turning a blind eye to groups that deploy ransomware against US companies, Blinken said.
“This is not a light switch moment,” Blinken said of Biden’s meeting with Putin in Geneva, set for Wednesday.
“This is the beginning of testing that proposition, and Russia will decide by his actions which direction it wants to go in,” Blinken said from Brussels. “We’ll see that play out in the months ahead.”
Blinken said no responsible country should harbour criminals engaged in cyber-attacks, and that he expects Biden will raise the issue with Putin. ”That’s very much on the agenda,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Biden was wrapping up a Group of Seven summit in England on Sunday before joining Blinken in Brussels for a meeting with other members of the Nato alliance. Biden said at a news conference on Sunday he agrees with Putin’s assessment that US-Russian relations are “at a low point.”
Representative Michael McCaul, the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Biden administration has weakened its position towards Putin by “giving him a lot of stuff.”
That includes the administration’s decision to refrain from sanctions related to the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline to Germany, as well as not cracking down on Russia after the SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline hacks, McCaul said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The price for admission, the ticket for this seat, was way too high,” the Texas Republican said. “It is time to start hitting back.”