As Biden-Putin Meet Looms, Geneva to Host U.S., Russian Summit for Third Time

Geneva will host Wednesday's summit between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the third time it will serve as the setting of a U.S.-Russia meeting, the Associated Press reported.

The Swiss city first hosted U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1955, and then Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev 30 years later. Both times, the two countries made progress in defusing tensions.

With the current relationship between the superpowers at its lowest, this meeting will be a crucial step in moving forward.

For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.

This time, hopes loom for even a modest improvement on the current U.S.-Russia chill over issues like Ukraine, human rights and cyber attacks.

Soviet and Russian studies expert Robert Legvold, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, said Geneva hosted crucial U.S.-Soviet talks on strategic nuclear arms control and has had a relatively good track record as a venue where the two countries can cooperate.

If there's any city "where business has been done ... it has been Geneva," Legvold said of the two rival countries.

Legvold noted how Eisenhower used the 1955 meeting to launch what became known as the "Open Skies" agreement, which called for U.S. and Soviet militaries to exchange maps to boost transparency and defuse tensions.

That eventually led to a treaty in 1992, which let each country carry out surveillance flights over the other's territory. Under Trump, the U.S. pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty, and the Biden administration announced last month that the U.S. would not rejoin it — alleging repeated Russian violations.

Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," and has sought to rebuild Russia's Soviet-era global clout and prestige. He often has been critical of Gorbachev's legacy, saying that the U.S. and its Western allies cheated the Soviet Union by pledging not to expand NATO eastward following the reunification of Germany — and then breaking their promise.

Today's Geneva is not the den of Cold War espionage and intrigue that it once was. But while Switzerland has in many ways cleaned up its reputation as a hub for the rich and powerful to squirrel away funds and avoid taxes, experts say many autocrats are still drawn to the discretion and stability of Swiss banking.

Nevertheless, the city has painstakingly built a reputation for diplomacy, humanitarianism and multilateralism. The International Red Cross was founded here in 1863 to help victims of conflict. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson helped set up the League of Nations — the U.N. predecessor that the U.S. Congress shunned — to foster dialogue. The Geneva Conventions set rules about humanitarian conduct in war.

More recently, Geneva has been home to the United Nations' European headquarters, its human rights office and scores of U.N.-affiliated bodies, multilateral institutions and humanitarian and advocacy groups — often with U.S. support.

Still, in this city of about 200,000 people, Trump casts a long shadow. He pulled the U.S. out of the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council. He criticized the WTO and largely stripped it of its ability to settle trade disputes. Just over a year ago, Trump paused U.S. funding for the WHO and threatened to pull the U.S. out over the health agency's alleged missteps and kowtowing to China early in the COVID-19 crisis.

Biden kept the U.S. in the U.N. health agency and restored U.S. funding.

"Certainly, the former situation (under Trump) was threatening ... Geneva as a place for multilateral negotiation" as well as its many technical organizations, said Nicolas Levrat, director of the Global Studies Institute at the University of Geneva.

He differentiated between Geneva's lure as a site for face-to-face power diplomacy and its penchant for multilateralism, which the U.S. hasn't always supported — even before Trump.

"(The) Biden administration is not as unilateral as the Trump administration. And it is a very good thing, I think, for global governance (and) for the place of Geneva," Levrat said. But, he said, the U.S. has "never been a genuine supporter of multilateralism."

Thomas Greminger, a former secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which counts both Russia and the U.S. as participating states, said the choice of Geneva for the summit was "highly symbolic" and hoped it will signal "an important U.S. role" in multilateralism.

For Putin and Biden, amid tensions between their two countries, Greminger suggested the summit offers a neutral venue that could help reduce polarization.

"Safe spaces are again becoming very important -- that is, places where people that are not like-minded can meet, discuss and try to establish bridges," said Greminger, now director of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. Geneva "has a track record for this."