Beden and Putin meet at this pytoresque villa

US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet today at a time when deep disagreements exist between the two countries and hopes of significant achievements remain slim.

Both sides have said that meeting at a picturesque lake-side villa in Geneva will bring more stable relations, though both sides adhere to diametrically opposed positions for sticking points like Russian intervention in American elections, cyber attacks and Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Although the atmosphere will be solemn and tense, the background will be spectacular: an elegant villa with a garden of 30 ha on the shores of Lake Geneva. The lakeside city, known as the crossroad of the Cold War and the center of Swiss freedom, impartial and humanitarian, will become the center of world attention.

This marks the third time that talks are held between American and Russian leaders in Geneva. The first was a multilatheral meeting attended by US President Wright Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khushchev in 1955.

The second came after 30 years when President Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev with an important meeting that some see as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

We do not expect a long list of achievements from this meeting, a US official said during the trip to Geneva on the presidential plane, adding that the two leaders are expected to somewhere for hours.

Relations have been exasperated for years, starting with Russia's annexation of the Crime in 2014, Russian intervention in Syria in 2015, and the US charges rejected by the Kremlin, that Russia is involved in the American elections.

President Biden's comment in March that Putin is <x0-killer” further exacerbated the situation, resulting in a call from the Kremlin of his ambassador to Washington. In April, the US summoned their ambassador to Moscow. None of them have yet to return to office.

A senior US official said the US aims to reach a number of “task sharing” that in the government jar in Washington implies the appointment of several officials on both sides to continue discussions at the lowest level “on topics that can be jointly worked to advance national interests and make the world safer”. <

Gun control is one of the topics in which understanding has been recorded over the years, despite friction in other areas.

Vladimir Frolov, former Russian diplomat, told Reuters news agency that President Putin wants respect relations and wants to be treated as members of the former Soviet Union's Political Bureau in 1960-1980, for “a treatment to symbolically assess Russia as an equal strategic power with the United States”.

In exchange, Moscow could be willing to reduce some of the folly it has done, said Mr. Frolov, adding that with this term it means that “will have more poisonings, physical violence, arrests and kidnappings of American and Russian citizens. There will be interference in internal affairs”.

Dmitry Train, director of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, says that modest goals are predetermined for the meeting:

The first success from this meeting in Geneva will be the fact that the parties were not punched, so there will be no need for a military conflict,”, he says.