no unpleasant surprises
The White House is trying to keep expectations low for the Biden-Putin meeting
The White House is tempering its expectations ahead of Wednesday's meeting between President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, CNN's Kaitlin Collins reported Tuesday. Biden's team is "not expecting a big set of deliverables," a senior administration official told reporters onboard Air Force One, per Collins. In other words, there's not much hope the Kremlin will agree to anything significant.
While they're not expecting much from Putin in return, the Biden administration is prepared to go all in. Per Voice of America, the senior official said "nothing is off the table," reinforcing the idea that Biden will bring up human rights issues like Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny's imprisonment despite the Kremlin's stance that domestic policies should be kept out of the meeting.
The sides are scheduled to meet for around five hours. The typically late-arriving Putin will reportedly be the first on the scene, followed by Biden, and the two will then sit down with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, before a few other officials join the discussions later on. Biden will then finish up with a solo press conference.