Center for Security Policy
HOMENATORUSSIAHEADING TO CANOSSA – DETESTABLE SUBMISSION: EXPLAINING BIDEN’S SUMMITRY WITH PUTIN
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Heading to Canossa – Detestable submission: Explaining Biden’s summitry with Putin
June 15, 2021 Andrei Illarionov
The main mystery of Joe Biden’s upcoming meeting with Vladimir Putin is the lack of a clear understanding of why the American president needs it.
In order to realize the uniqueness of the upcoming summit, it makes sense to pay attention to the surprising oddities of its preparation.
Biden requested the meeting, through his NSC chief and Putin’s counterpart
First, the meeting was initiated not by Vladimir Putin, but by Joe Biden. It was Biden who called Putin on April 13. A few weeks earlier, the US president seemed to agree with a journalist’s opinion that the Kremlin owner is a “killer.” Putin’s subsequent personal offer to debate to Biden publicly was followed by an insulting refusal from Biden’s press secretary. But less than a month after the noisy interview and the humiliating refusal, Biden himself called Putin. Moreover, he not only phoned, but personally invited Putin to participate in both a multilateral meeting on climate issues and a bilateral summit between them.
Secondly, the organizers of the summit on both sides are not the top diplomats, but the presidential aides for national security. Not Antony Blinken and Sergei Lavrov, but Jake Sullivan and Nikolai Patrushev. Sullivan has 12 years experience at the State Department. Patrushev spent 47 years in the Soviet and Russian political police – the Soviet KGB and the Russian FSB.Why did the Biden administration choose Patrushev, and not Lavrov, as its liaison for the summit? We don’t know. It is an unusual partnership. As head of the FSB, Patrushev became infamous for publicly confirming that his men planted a massive explosive device seized by local police from the basement of a residential building in Ryazan in September, 1999. The bomb, which would have leveled the apartment block, had been planted by FSB officers, apparently on Patrushev’s order, or at least with his knowledge. The incident appeared to be part of several deadly apartment bombings that Putin used as a pretext to take political power.
https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/heading-to-canossa-detestable-submission-explaining-bidens-summitry-with-putin/
