Moscow and Washington have agreed on an extensive agenda for a meeting between Russian and US presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden. The rest of the issues not on the agenda for Wednesday's talks in Geneva may be addressed during the discussion on the leaders' own initiative.
Advisor to the Russian president Yuri Ushakov told reporters that the scheduled topics for discussion are arranged in roughly the following order: the state and prospects of Russian-American relations, major issues of strategic stability, information security and the fight against cybercrime.
Next on the agenda is a block of discussions on "specific outstanding issues of bilateral relations". Additionally, the agenda includes issues of economic cooperation, climate, the Arctic and countering the coronavirus.
The regional problems in the Middle East, Syria, Libya, the situation around the Iranian nuclear program, the settlement in Afghanistan, the situation on the Korean Peninsula and in Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Ukraine, will be left for "dessert", as Ushakov put it.
Unresolved issues
The Kremlin says the unresolved issues in bilateral relations include arrests of Russian citizens at US request around the world (Moscow has counted about 60 such cases since 2008), as well as restrictions on diplomatic missions and seizures of Russian diplomatic property in the United States. "Our property there [in America] was, one might say, stolen," Ushakov recalled.
These and a number of other issues the Kremlin calls "mutual irritants in bilateral relations." "If we move at least some [of these issues] out of the way, it will already be good," the Russian presidential advisor stressed.
US agenda
The Kremlin expects the situation around Alexei Navalny and the Belarus issue to be among the topics that the US side will raise outside the approved agenda.
Among other issues on the agenda, the US administration called the human rights situation. "Nothing has been taken off the table [of the negotiations]," a representative of the US administration claimed.
At the same time, one of the main topics of the negotiations, the US delegation is going to make the hacking attacks, to which a number of companies and businesses in the US have been recently subjected. Washington believes that, as before, hackers based in Russia are behind the attacks. Biden, in fact, answered in the affirmative when asked if he was willing to discuss the idea of turning over cybercriminals to Russia. However, his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, later clarified that the White House chief was referring only to the intention of bringing hackers to justice within the country.
Complicated content
According to Ushakov, almost all topics of concern to both sides and the need to discuss which "is clear even to a third-grader" is reflected in the negotiating agenda agreed by Moscow and Washington, but the heads of states may raise any other issue if they wish. "The discussion will also touch on issues which have not been previously agreed to and not specified on the agenda," said the presidential advisor.
He concluded that coordinating the topics of the summit and the composition of the delegations was the easiest thing to do. "Everything else is much more complicated, the content [of the negotiations] is very complicated," the Kremlin representative stressed.
Until the last day before the summit, the question remained open as to whether a joint document would be signed at the end of the summit. However, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS on Tuesday evening that there would be "no signing [documents]."
Both Moscow and Washington expect that the summit may decide to return the heads of the two countries' diplomatic missions, Anatoly Antonov and John Sullivan, who are in consultations in their capitals, to their embassies.
State of relations
Since 2011, the US has imposed sanctions on Russia 96 times, including three times under Biden. Russia has repeatedly expressed a willingness to work with Washington to improve relations, stressing that such dialogue should be based on equality and respect for each other's interests.
In addition to policy issues, Moscow also attaches importance to economic cooperation between the two countries. "Many US companies want to work here, they are being pulled out of our market by the ear, they are giving way to competitors," Putin recently noted in an interview with Russia 1 television channel.
In 2020, trade turnover between the two countries decreased by 9% to $23.8 billion, but in the first four months of this year, export-import flow increased by almost 16% over the same period last year. As the Kremlin noted, Russia currently has approximately 3,000 companies with American capital participation and their total assets are estimated at $75 billion, and the US delegation at the last St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was the most representative - more than 200 people.
"In general, there is something to talk about, there are such common topics," Putin emphasized recently, speaking of the summit's agenda.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: official website of the President of the Russian Federation
Based on materials from TASS