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This is VOA News. Via remote, I'm Marissa Melton. U.S. President Joe Biden meets with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for the first time in Geneva Wednesday amid deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia. The meeting takes place in the final hours of Biden's first trip abroad as president during which he has already attended the 47th G7 summit in the English town of Carbis Bay, as well as talks with NATO and EU leaders in Brussels. The White House said Saturday that Biden would appear alone at a post-summit news conference unlike former President Donald Trump, who addressed reporters together with Putin following their 2018 summit in Helsinki. A White House official said Saturday that a solo press conference is useful for clearly communicating the meeting's content to reporters including topics of contention.
In April, Biden expelled 10 Russian diplomats and imposed new sanctions on six Russian technology companies that provide support to the cyber program run by Putin's intelligence services that have been linked to the hacking of the SolarWinds information technology company. In May, two key U.S. businesses - Colonial Pipeline, which transports fuel in the southeastern U.S., and the JBS meat production company - were targeted in cyberattacks believed to have originated in Russia. Both Colonial and JBS paid millions of dollars in ransom demands. Some of that was recovered from the Colonial ransom. The White House also said it expects the Biden-Putin meeting "to be candid and straightforward" and that Biden will bring up the ransomware attacks originating in Russia, the Kremlin's aggression toward Ukraine, the imprisonment of dissidents and other issues. Putin has rejected U.S. claims that Moscow and Russian hackers are carrying out debilitating cyberattacks on American companies and government agencies. This is VOA News.
