Putin’s rocky relationship with American presidents

President Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, going where many recent U.S. presidents have gone before. The much-anticipated Geneva summit — on the heels of Biden’s whirlwind European tour — was expected to be tense. The new administration has been vocal in its opposition to cyberattacks on American companies by suspected Russian hackers, as well as the Kremlin’s crackdown on political opponents. The two held separate news conferences after the summit, which Putin called “quite constructive.”

“It was important to meet in person,” Biden said.

A tête-à-tête between Russian and American presidents is customary. Since the Cold War, the two countries have maintained open, if often strained, relations. Putin has met with every sitting president since Bill Clinton in moments filled with awkward silences, icy stares and sometimes professions of trust.

When President Donald Trump and Putin met in Helsinki in 2018, the summit went off without a hitch — for Putin, at least. Trump, who expressed admiration for the Russian leader, shocked American intelligence officials when he defied their findings and instead supported Putin’s claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election. He called the U.S. investigation “a total witch hunt.”

The two maintained a relatively chummy relationship throughout Trump’s presidency, meeting at least five times. After a meeting in Hamburg in 2017, Trump took his interpreter’s notes and instructed them not to share any details from the interaction, part of the unusual secrecy that shrouded the president’s relationship with Putin.

Putin’s relationship with Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was far more frosty. Obama opposed Putin’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and the two clashed over Russian backing of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime and claims by the West and others that Assad used chemical weapons on civilians. In 2016, during the final months of Obama’s second term, the two were captured in an iconic stare-down at a Group of 20 summit in China.

It was one of many times the leaders engaged in talks they said were productive, despite undeniably bristling body language.

With Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, the relationship evolved, from one of outward respect and trust to one of animosity and even potential blows.

When the two first met in 2001, half a year into Bush’s first term, the Texan president proclaimed, he looked Putin in the eye and “found him very straightforward and trustworthy.”

But those tender words eventually grew stale. In 2006, president George W. Bush complained to the prime minister of Denmark that is was hard to negotiate with his Russian counterpart. “It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.” He also reportedly told his close friend then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair that one interaction with Putin almost pushed him to lose his temper. “At one point the interpreter made me so mad that I nearly reached over the table and slapped the hell out of the guy. He had a mocking tone, making accusations about America,” Bush said.

For Biden, this isn’t a first encounter. He flew to Moscow in 2011 as vice president to meet with the Russian leader.

In March during an interview with ABC News, Biden agreed when asked if he believed Putin was a “killer,” a comment that sparked a negative reaction from the Kremlin, which called the relationship between the United States and Russia “very bad.”

After Wednesday’s meeting, Biden said he called on Putin to act on issues including preventing cyberattacks from Russian soil, and releasing U.S. citizens imprisoned in Russia. Whether Putin will agree to meet those calls remains to be seen.