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Biden and Putin to Meet Face-to-Face in Summit. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired June 16, 2021 - 06:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. I'm John Berman with Brianna Keilar.

[05:59:22]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: This is NEW DAY's special coverage of a major moment in history, and for that we go to Wolf Blitzer.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Thanks very much, guys.

We're live here in Geneva, Switzerland, only moments away from a truly historic face-to-face meeting between the U.S. president, Joe Biden, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

President Biden arrived last night after meetings with G-7 and NATO leaders. He has prepared intensely for an encounter that will test his decades of experience on the world stage and his diplomatic skills with a truly, truly formidable adversary.

President Biden's hope is to open the lines of communication with Russia. He wants to stop any further deterioration in the relationship, which he admits has reached a new low point.

There's a lot on the agenda, from nuclear arms, to climate change, to recent cyberattacks, and a potential prisoner swap for Americans detained in Russia. There will be no, repeat, no typical joint news conference afterward. Instead, each letter will hold his own press briefing.

The White House is determined to avoid the kind of embarrassing spectacle we witnessed back in 2018 in Helsinki when then-President Trump took the stage with Putin and said he believed the Russian leader over his own, his own U.S. intelligence agencies.

The long-awaited Biden/Putin summit takes place next hour at the historic Villa La Grange. Our team is here in Geneva, covering every angle of this monumental meeting. The stakes are clearly enormous.

So let's begin with CNN's Natasha Bertrand.

Natasha, so what do we know, first of all, about today's meeting? Who will be there? How will it be structured?

NATASHA BERTRAND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Wolf. So the format of this meeting today is not going to look or feel anything like Helsinki in 2018.

The Russian president is expected to arrive at this lakeside villa around 1 p.m. local time or 7 a.m. Eastern Time. And a group of Russian officials have actually already arrived at that summit location in anticipation of this summit.

President Biden is expected to arrive; shortly thereafter, President Putin. And then there will be a brief meeting, a brief photo op with the Swiss president, who will greet them both at that summit.

Following that, the president, the U.S. president, the Russian president will go into their first meeting accompanied by two of their most senior aides. On the U.S. side, it will be Secretary of State Antony Blinken. On the Russian side, it will be Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, along with President Putin and President Biden there.

Following that, there will be an expanded meeting with five members on each side. So it will be a group with Biden, from a group of State Department officials, his national security adviser, the Russia and U.S. ambassador to Russia. And then on the Russian side, there will also be a group of top aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in an expanded meeting there.

Important to note, there will be no joint press conference after these meetings. And that's primarily because again, they want to avoid the kind of spectacle that we saw with President Donald Trump and President Putin in Helsinki in 2018.

The White House does not want to put the president and the Russian president on kind of the same level there and have this devolve into a tit-for-tat, with the Russian president trying to undercut the U.S. president and undermining any good conversations and good progress they may have made during the meetings throughout the day.

So this is going to be very different from what we saw in 2018, Wolf. And whether or not there are going to be any deliverables coming out of this, of course, is -- is an entirely different question.

BLITZER: Yes. I was in Helsinki for that joint news conference. Clearly, Putin would have loved to have a joint news conference, not so much the president of the United States.

That's why there won't be a joint news conference. Natasha, thank you very much. So what's on the line today? There are multiple issues that President Biden and Putin will certainly discuss.

Joining us now to explain what those areas are. Our national security correspondent, Kylie Atwood, is joining us. Kylie, so set the scene for us on that.

There's a lot that is on the table, Wolf. And I just want to work from some of these issues, right?

First of all, I want to talk about cyber-hacking. This could be the most challenging but most critical issue that is on the table today. That's because we have seen these recent cyberattacks carried out by Russian-based hackers against U.S. companies, U.S. government agencies in recent months.

This is really high-stakes for the U.S. So will President Biden lay down any red lines to say to President Putin, stay away from critical infrastructure in the U.S. Stay away from nuclear power plants.

This is an area to keep an eye on. Challenging because President Putin denies any involvement in these recent cyberattacks.

Another area, of course: election interference. This has been critical to the issues between the U.S. and Russia over the last recent years. Of course, Russia interfered in the U.S. election in 2016 and 2020. They deny involvement. This is expected to be another issue that's on the table today.

Another thing that we do expect to come up, Ukraine. In recent months, we have seen this Russian military buildup along the Ukrainian border. The U.S. has been very clear in that they are supported -- supportive of Ukrainian sovereignty, and this is an area where President Putin has said, Listen, this is our area of the world. Stay away.

So this is another challenging topic.

[06:05:00]

Now, Navalny, he is the Russian opposition leader. He is jailed in Russia right now. Yesterday, President Biden said his death would be a tragedy. If he died, it would affect negatively Russia's relations with the world and the United States.

Now, Russia does not want to address this topic. Navalny is someone that Putin sees, obviously, as a threat. He also sees this as an internal matter. He doesn't want to discuss it.

The White House has said that this will come up.

And this, of course, brings us to human rights. Generally speaking, there has been a crackdown on opposition voices in Russia. This is something that the White House has also said will come up today. There's a long list here, Wolf.

Then we also have Americans who are detained in Russia. Two of those folks, Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed. I can tell you that their families are watching this summit extremely closely. They're two former U.S. Marines.

Could there be a prisoner swap? Could the presidents lay down some conversations for the future to release these two Americans detained in Russia?

And then the expulsion of diplomats. This is one topic that both of the countries do want to discuss. It has been a dramatic downturn in diplomats, Russian diplomats here in the U.S., U.S. diplomats in Russia in recent years, and that has negatively impacted diplomacy between the two countries. We know that both of the ambassadors, the Russian ambassador here in

Washington was recalled to Moscow months ago. The U.S. ambassador to Russia came back to Washington months ago, as well. And so this is an area where we could potentially see some forward movement.

Will these ambassadors go back to those countries and begin some normal working-level diplomacy?

The last area that I want to discuss with you is nuclear stability and arms control. This is an area where, actually, both of the sides have said they want to discuss this. This is an area where they could potentially build upon nuclear arms agreements between the two countries.

And it's an area where, essentially, if both of the presidents give the green light, their working teams could work on this in the future. And so this is one area where we're going to be watching to see if there's any progress out of this hour-long meeting between these two presidents -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Excellent wrap-up of the issues on the agenda, Kylie. Thank you very much.

The White House says President Biden plans to press Putin on key areas of concern for U.S. national security. And they say this summit will be nothing -- repeat, nothing -- like the 2018 spectacle when Putin met then-President Trump in Helsinki.

Lot's get some more from CNN's Jeff Zeleny.

Jeff, you've been working your sources. What are you hearing?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, we know, as president, Biden has been traveling here to Geneva, really spending the last week abroad, talking to European leaders. He has described Vladimir Putin as a worthy adversary.

But one key over-reigning thought is going into this meeting. Can the United States establish a more productive, more stable relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin? That is what this meeting will help determine.

But we do know, as we talk to our White House sources and officials, that cyberattacks will be a central theme of this conversation. President Biden will press the Russian president on the attacks on the critical nation's infrastructure back in the U.S.

But, Wolf, we heard President Biden describe President Putin as a worthy adversary. When you step back and look at the history of all of this, President Biden, of course, has spent his life's work in the foreign policy sector. He has met with President Putin before, as vice president, and he's spoken to him twice on the telephone since taking office, once in January, once in April.

But this face-to-face meeting, the White House believes the president was the driving force behind this. In fact, it was controversial inside the West Wing of the White House whether this summit should even happen. But President Biden said he wanted to have a face-to-face conversation to see if he could have a productive relationship with Vladimir Putin. That is very much an open question.

But as the president traveled here to Geneva, we asked him at the NATO headquarters on Monday how he could ever determine if he could trust Vladimir Putin.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZELENY: Ronald Reagan said trust but verify. What you do say to Vladimir Putin?

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'd verify first and then trust. In other words, everything would have to be shown to be actually occurring. It's not about, you know, trusting. It's about agreeing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZELENY: So this is one thing that, of course, President Biden has in his mind, the history framing this entire summit.

Of course, Geneva was the site of a 1985 discussion between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that ultimately led to the end of the Cold War. President Biden was already on the scene then in the Senate.

So he comes to this meeting with decades of experience. The question: will that matter at all?

But the White House is going into this meeting, really, with a sense of allowing it to play out and see how it works. So for all the talks of scheduling, yes, that first meeting, this is essentially going to play out as an act in two parts. The first meeting between President Biden and Vladimir Putin and their two top diplomats, and then later, a meeting with five advisers.

But we are told that this meeting could breathe. It could be longer than five hours. It will just be determined by the two presidents themselves.

So Wolf, as you well know from being in Helsinki with President Putin and President Trump, we are also watching the timing. Will President Putin arrive on time or slightly late? Will he make President Biden wait for his meeting, as President Putin did for President Trump?

So for all of the scheduling and preparations that have gone into this moment, there is also an air of unpredictability here. It is very much up to how these two leaders get on and what both of them want to get out of today, Wolf.

BLITZER: What kind of mind games, potentially, they want to play with each other.

All right. Thank you very much. Jeff Zeleny reporting. Russia state-owned media, by the way, now reporting that Putin has

left Sochi, is en route to his meeting with President Biden here in Geneva.

So what are we hearing from the Russian side about today's meeting? CNN's Moscow correspondent, Matthew Chance, he's in Geneva with us, as well. What are you hearing, Matthew?

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, we've just been in contact with Dmitry Peskov, who's Vladimir Putin's press secretary. There was some speculation that the plane from Sochi carrying President Putin already landed. They said that hasn't happened yet. He's still going to be landing on time, and then he's going to be making his way in the next hour to the Villa La Grange on the banks of Lake Geneva. This 18th Century mansion where those historic talks,, that face-to-face meeting between President Biden and President Trump [SIC] will take place very, very shortly indeed.

In terms of what the Russian expectations are, they are very low, indeed, in short. And that's exactly the sort of words, kind of framing that the White House has been using, as well.

The fact the meeting is taking place at all is being seen as an achievement. But, you know, having said that, there are areas of common ground, climate change, arms reduction, and various regional conflicts which they hoped to discuss. There could even, according to the Kremlin, be some joint statements signed on some of those issues.

But you know, the substantial core disagreements in this very fraught relationship between the United States and Russia, I don't think anyone is seriously expecting any solid progress during this one summit here in Geneva when it comes to cyberattacks against the United States, many of them emanating from Russia. Don't expect any progress there.

The military threat that Russia continues to pose to its neighbors, particularly Ukraine. I doubt very much whether the Kremlin is going to be giving any ground on that.

And when it comes to Alexei Navalny and the opposition activists who have been targeted, and the groups that have been essentially outlawed and cracked down on inside Russia, and well, you know, according to the Kremlin, when I last spoke to them, they say they're ready to inform President Biden about that.

But they're not going to discuss it. It is not a matter for negotiation as far as the Kremlin are concerned. So yes, there are some areas of potential compromise. We've heard our previous reporters talk about the possible exchange or possible return of ambassadors to each other's -- to each other's countries, things like that.

But, again, on those substantial disagreements, you know, I think Putin is going to be taking a very tough line.

BLITZER: I suspect he will. And I walked over yesterday to the Villa La Grange where you are. Certainly a beautiful area, but there's extensive fencing, security fencing and barbed wire all around, which is, of course, totally understandable.

Matthew, we'll get back to you. Thank you very much.

President Putin will arrive first after today's summit at the Villa La Grange. That meeting in the next 15 minutes or so, we're told, followed by President -- followed by President Biden.

Our live coverage from Geneva will continue here. We're following all of this -- John.

BERMAN: The meeting at the Villa La Grange won't be President Biden's first face-to-face meeting with Putin and certainly not the first time meeting with Russia. How his past experience will play into today's meeting.

KEILAR: And breaking overnight, Israel launching new air strikes in Gaza, less than a month into a ceasefire.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:18:39]

BERMAN: Welcome back to CNN's special live coverage of this historic U.S.-Russia summit in Geneva. President Biden putting his decades of experience to the test in the meeting with Vladimir Putin.

It's not the first time the two leaders will be face-to-face. A decade ago, it was Vice President Biden meeting Prime Minister Putin with Biden famously telling Putin he had no soul.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN (voice-over): Over more than four decades in politics, President Joe Biden has plenty of experience in foreign policy. He has met with at least two Russian presidents and three Soviet leaders, and today, he will sit down again with Vladimir Putin.

BIDEN: I have met with him. He's bright. He's tough. And I have found that he is a, as they say, when I used to play ball, a worthy adversary.

BERMAN: That meeting, ten years ago at the Kremlin, where the then- vice president said he told the Russian leader, "I don't think you have a soul."

Biden, who has called Putin a "KGB thug," took it one step further in an interview earlier this year.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS: So you know Vladimir Putin. Do you think he's a killer?

BIDEN: Mm-hmm. I do.

BERMAN: Those words just weeks after Biden had his first phone call as president with Putin. BIDEN: I made it clear that President Putin, in a manner very

different from my predecessor, that the day of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia's aggressive actions, interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens, are over.

[06:20:12]

BERMAN: By April, the president ordered sanction on Russia in response to cyberattacks and election attacks with an additional warning.

BIDEN: It is in the interest of the United States to work with Russia. We should, and we will. Where Russia seeks to violate the interests of the United States, we will respond.

BERMAN: A move Biden promised while running for office last year.

BIDEN: Putin knows exactly who I am, and I know exactly who he is. And I let him know: no more. If he interferes in this election, there are going to be consequences. There are going to be consequences.

BERMAN: As vice president, he noted a change in Russia's relations with NATO allies.

BIDEN: The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and the members of our alliance. It's time, to paraphrase President Obama, it's time to press the reset button and revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia.

BERMAN: This time around, a reset will be difficult, but Biden says he is hopeful to find some common ground with Putin.

BIDEN: I shared with our allies where I'll convey -- what I'll convey to President Putin, that I'm not looking for conflict with Russia, but that we will respond if Russia continues its harmful activities.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: So just some context into all President Biden's talk about Vladimir Putin's soul, Biden was responding to comments that President George W. Bush famously made about meeting Vladimir Putin in 2001. Biden -- Bush said he looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul.

And, Wolf, you'll remember that John McCain used to joke that when he looked into Biden's [SIC] -- John McCain looked into Putin's eyes, what he saw was KGB.

BLITZER: I remember that well. Excellent analysis. Thank you very much.

President Biden is expected to confront the Russian president over Russia's aggressive conduct and to make it clear what the red lines are. But some say that gives Putin a certain advantage, because setting red lines with an unpredictable leader like Putin, that's a rather risky move.

CNN's Jim Sciutto and Clarissa Ward, they're here with me right now.

When we say, Clarissa, that the stakes for both countries, the U.S. and Russia, are enormous during the course of today, I think that's a fair analysis.

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It's a fair analysis. I would say the stakes are higher for President Biden than they are for President Putin.

President Putin doesn't have a huge amount to lose today. Already, just appearing on the world stage, standing next to the president of the United States, speaks volumes about Russia's role in the world, its importance.

And so he will be seeking to transform that into something of a sort of public relations coup. Both men are going to be clear with each other about what the country's various red lines are, and I do think they will try hard to find some small areas of mutual cooperation to try to prevent the relationship from degrading further.

But President Putin has also been very clear and all his cohorts in the Kremlin. Expectations are very low today.

BLITZER: They certainly are. What do you think?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT/ANCHOR: Well, listen, the status quo suits Russia. Russia being able to carry out cyberattacks that damage and impact the U.S., that suits his interest. To continue to occupy Ukraine suits his interest. To continue to build his presence in Syria suits Russia's interests.

So if there is no progress on these issues today, Putin is just fine with that. And as Clarissa was saying, he got his moment on the stage on equal footing with President Trump.

So Biden is the one who wants to come home with something here. That said, the simple contrast between Geneva and Helsinki will be something of an accomplishment for this new president, because Helsinki, the famous Helsinki moment for Trump, where Trump chose Putin's word over that of the U.S. intelligence agencies, was a deeply damaging moment for the U.S., acknowledged even by Republicans at the time.

And so bad that we hear from Fiona Hill, President Trump's then-Russia adviser, she wanted to fake a medical episode, right, to interrupt that -- that Helsinki moment. That's how bad she thought it was. That's a remarkable thing to hear.

So -- so to have a U.S. president come here, and more traditionally, we will not stand for poisoning Alexei Navalny. We will not stand for these cyberattacks. I don't trust you. That's -- that's a step forward.

On the thornier issues, it's going to be a lot harder.

BLITZER: I noticed -- and I'm sure you have, as well, Clarissa -- a certain shift in Russian as far as Biden is concerned, in recent weeks and months. They were ridiculing him as old and weak and not very effective, but now they're suggesting, well, maybe he is more reflective.

WARD: I think there's a grudging respect for President Biden behind the scenes. He has decades of the experience, both politically and also diplomatically. President Putin has met with him. They know that they are dealing with a very different commodity to President Trump. They know that he's less -- that he's much more predictable, less impulsive.

[06:25:10]

And I think they also understand that potentially, there could be areas where deals could be made. That said, I think there are also reservations.

Because while President Trump may have come and gone, it's been exposed that the U.S. political system is very capricious and can change very quickly.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

WARD: So President Trump will be wanting to know, what does it mean to really strike a deal with you? How long does that last? Can America stay the course for longer than four years?

BLITZER: It looks like President Trump's plane is about to land here in Geneva. We're watching very closely. He flew in from Sochi. He'll spend the day and go back to Russia afterwards.

SCIUTTO: That's right. In fact, I think over our shoulders, we can see him approaching. It mostly likely is this one, because they cleared the air space. We saw -- there's one following the same path yesterday.

It is -- listen, you know, again, to Clarissa's point here, when you look at Biden in this moment, he has enormous experience.

And another difference in this summit is that it is less a gut affair, right? Trump in the summits with Kim, for instance, was confident that just the personality and the moment together with the foreign leader could move the relationship. Same in his relations with Putin.

The trouble is that didn't move those relationships fundamentally. Biden has a more traditional setup. He'll have the one-on-one. He'll have these breakout meetings with his other senior advisors, meeting with their Russian counterparts, Blinken, Jake Sullivan, et cetera.

And it's not just the formality that matters there, the predictability. But it also allows them to discuss in a substantive form some of these areas where there are potential agreements, perhaps a prisoner swap.

By the way, the Iran nuclear deal, that is a major area of agreement, I should say, between the two sides. They negotiated it here a few years ago. The U.S. pulled out under Trump. Biden wants to get back in. Russia would like that deal to be back in.

But again, to Clarissa's point, Russia is thinking, even like NATO allies, what happens in 2024? Can I trust that what you sign here is going to last beyond the next election? And that's a big question mark for all of America's relationships.

BLITZER: Is it significant, Clarissa? And you and I have covered these kinds of summits over the years, that there will be separate news conferences afterward, not a joint news conference?

WARD: It's definitely significant. We all understand that it's partly to avoid the humiliation of Helsinki.

But even going back further than that, President Putin did a press conference with President Bush back in 2008, where they had a testy exchange, and then he said, Well, I'd rather not have the kind of democracy you have in Iraq.

It was deeply embarrassing for the American president. Nobody wants to see that happen again.

And I also think there's a sense with this summit that it's closer or more akin to the kind of meetings that we saw during the Cold War, where they're choosing very small, very specific baby steps, almost, if you will, as areas of potential growth, not to fundamentally reset the relationship. That's not happening.

And by the way, President Vladimir Putin has no interest in being friends with the west. He likes it the way it is.

But trying to find ways or guardrails, if you like, to prevent that relationship from degrading to a worse point.

Keep in mind, Wolf, in September, Russia has elections, parliamentary elections. Another round of sanctions, that could be really devastating for President Vladimir Putin. He doesn't want to see that happen; particularly doesn't want to see it happen with regards to sovereign debt. So there is interest in both sides on trying to sort of steer the ship a little bit back more on course.

BLITZER: All right. Chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins is watching all of this unfold.

Kaitlan, you're here in Geneva. Set the scene, where you are, what are you seeing?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, here we are, you know, just a few feet away from where they are actually going to come face-to-face in just a matter of about an hour, we expect, if either of them is actually late to showing up to this.

We know the Russian leader is often notoriously late to these kinds of meetings with U.S. presidents.

But, Wolf, so far, we are already seeing the Russian foreign minister arrive just a few minutes ago. The Swizz president, as well, who of course, is playing host to this historic summit, the first face-to- face that we've seen between President Biden and President Putin since Biden took office.

And so I think what we're going to be watching for at the beginning is a lot of the body language, to see what it looks like when they're actually walking on this red carpet outside Villa La Grange.

Yes, there is actually a red carpet that has been rolled out for both leaders. And I think one question is do they shake hands at the beginning as they are about to go inside for what is expected to be a very tense and tightly choreographed meeting between the two of them.

And we know that these optics are just as important to the White House as they are to the Russians, because that is part of the justification, from not having a joint press conference later on after these meetings have wrapped.

Because just a few feet away, this is where President Biden's press conference is going to be, and over there, we walked by where President Putin's is going to be, with the Russian press. So completely separated on this park grounds, where they are going to be later on.

But of course, I mean, a lot of that depends on what actually happens when they're inside the room together.

And just to give your viewers a little bit of information about what the format of this is going to look like, we know at the beginning, it will be President Biden and President Putin and just one staffer each in the room while they're meeting.