Summit G-20 in Indonesia: Biden won't see Putin even in the hallway-Politico

The official meeting is impossible, the US president will not meet Putin even in the hallway and during a group photography of leaders. "We know that President Biden thinks of Putin. He considers him a murderer and a war criminal," said William Taylor, a former US ambassador to Ukraine. The presidents met once at a summit in Geneva in the summer of 2021, they last communicated in February a few days before the start of a full -scale war in Ukraine, the newspaper reports.

The decision to avoid Putin has created logistical problems for the White House. Negotiations in Washington and Beijing began that the Summit of Baiden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping began within the G-20, officials. In the White House for several weeks, the interior discussions of the possible presence of Putin at the G-20 summit were conducted. The Western wing agreed that Biden should not meet with the President of the Russian Federation. Foreign policy experts had other views.

The former Commander -in -Chief of NATO forces in Europe James Stavridis considers Baiden's participation in a meeting with Putin. "He (US President) must take advantage of the moment to look Putin into his eyes and say his losing," the military commented. The former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFol, recalled that a few months after Putin and Baiden's meeting in Geneva, Moscow began to charge troops to the borders with Ukraine.

The diplomat is disturbed by a similar escalation if the meeting will happen again. "This is a complicated challenge. The crisis is important, but the problem is that you give Putin the platform to demand he desired," the former ambassador said. The G-20 Summit will be the most expected multinational meeting in recent years, since the war in Ukraine has become a test for Europe, whose economy is on the verge of recession, Politico reports.

Unlike the G-7 summit, which contains exceptionally rich democratic countries, a number of authoritarian countries include G-20. Not all participants can unite around Ukraine, as the European countries did, the authors said. Earlier, the American leader allowed the possibility of discussing with Putin the problem of releasing the American basketball player Brittny Grainer, whom the court of Moscow sentenced to 9 years of colony on charges of storage and smuggling of drugs.