Thread by @baunov

1/8 When Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the summit with U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva this week, he was representing a new Russia. My take of the Geneva summit in a broader context carnegie.ru/commentary/848…

2/8 The new Russia is no longer developing by building Western institutions. Russia will no longer be evaluated according to external criteria. This is why plans for the summit had no impact on the regime’s treatment of the opposition or independent media bit.ly/3q56gs1

3/8 All of Biden’s attempts to shame Putin for the tribulations of Russian opposition were stonewalled with a lack of understanding and counter-accusations. For Putin, there is no longer a system of coordinates in which those reproaches carry any weight.bit.ly/3q56gs1

4/8 What Moscow is proposing is a renewed format of Cold War–era relations, when the two sides operated in full recognition of their obvious differences, contained each other’s expansion, and together wrote the rules needed to avoid a fatal collision bit.ly/3q56gs1

5/8 Putin did not decide not to make any conciliatory gestures ahead of the summit and to present the new Russia unapologetically just because relations with the United States are already at rock bottom bit.ly/3q56gs1

6/8 Another important reason is that the expansionism of Russia and the United States, unlike during the Cold War, is causing them to collide in the new world, where both are perceived as diminishing against the backdrop of other growing powers bit.ly/3q56gs1

7/8 Biden hasn’t forfeited the theoretical possibility of ending the active standoff with Russia and starting to replace chaos with a relationship built out of the ruins of Russia’s Western path, and a new contractual order with Russia bit.ly/3q56gs1

8/8 For Putin, it’s a chance to make clear that reaching an agreement with Russia is no guarantee of any future Western leanings, and that the West must accept Russia as it is, as it did during the previous era of bipolarity bit.ly/3q56gs1