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"It makes no sense to have a 'summit' for the mere fact of having a 'summit'. You have to have them not for a matter of timing, but when you have a strategy, when you know what you want to achieve in it, and

when you have strategy".

In those terms, John Bolton, former National Security adviser with Donald Trump - with whom he ended up confronted - has explained to ELMUNDO the meeting scheduled for this Wednesday between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden in Geneva. It is the

first meeting

between the president of the United States and that of Russia since Donald Trump and Putin met on July 16, 2018 in Helsinki.

The meeting between Trump and Putin occurred at a time when relations between the two countries were in

free fall

after the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula, in Ukraine, and their interference, through Facebook and other social networks, in the 2016 US elections. But at least there was one saving grace: Trump admired and respected Putin.

Biden's case is different. He is the first US president in three and a half decades - since Ronald Reagan - who has not come to the White House promising to improve relations with Russia. Biden has called Putin a "murderer" and, while he has softened his rhetoric on the eve of the "summit," the most he has come to say is that the Russian "is a worthwhile adversary." Putin, for his part, has also not shown his intention to soften his positions. On Monday, in an interview broadcast by the US television network NBC, the Russian president did not even promise to guarantee that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny gets out

of jail alive

because "the sanitary facilities in those places are not the best."

The question, then, is what to expect from the Geneva 'summit'.

The 2018 between Trump and Putin ended with a joint press conference in which the US president left more than one speechless by declaring that he

believed the Russian president, and not his own security

and espionage services, when deciding whether or not Russia had intervened in the 2016 presidential elections. That was all that came out of that meeting.

Even the Republicans, who controlled Congress, set about imposing more and more sanctions on Russia, despite opposition from the White House.

Chart a new nuclear deal

This time, there won't even be a Putin-Biden press conference. And, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated on Monday of last week, "We don't see the 'summits' between the United States and Russia in terms of achieving anything concrete. Because if you expect something concrete to come out, it can you have to wait a long time. " Which leads, again, to Bolton's question: what are they meeting for? The former Trump adviser - who in November did not vote for him, but for Ronald Reagan, a president who has been dead for 16 years - explained yesterday by Zoom what the meeting can become: "The two leaders

can put themselves in front of each other to read a list of grievances,

but that can also be done by phone, or leave the task to the heads of their diplomacies. "

For now, there is a tangible issue, which can allow Biden to 'sell' the success of the meeting to his public opinion: the opening of negotiations to reach a new agreement to

reduce nuclear weapons.

It is one of the few things that both powers agree on.

The US and Russia have thousands of atomic warheads that they do not need, and they have been cutting their 'stocks' for decades.

In addition, Trump initiated, and Biden has reinforced, a process of modernization of those weapons that can cause a significant part of the existing ones to be dismantled.

That can serve to Biden to sign up a little less in the face of internal public opinion.

Putin, for his part, has the advantage that, with the opposition in prison or in exile, he cares little for Russian public opinion.

But that remains to be seen.

For Bolton, the result is uncertain and, probably, it

will be favorable to Putin, because "he will be much better prepared than Biden."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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