“Ready for War”: Biden’s Coming Russia Crisis

Putin at the G8
(Photo by Matt Dunham - WPA Pool /Getty Images)
Julia Ioffe
July 19, 2021

Two weeks before the Biden-Putin summit in Geneva, Andranik Migranyan went on Russian state television to offer his commentary. Migranyan teaches at the Moscow academy that trains Russian diplomats and spies, where he was once a student himself, alongside his old friend Sergei Lavrov, the long-serving foreign minister of Russia. Everyone was comparing the upcoming meeting to another Geneva summit: the one between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. It was the first time those two American and Soviet leaders had met and it was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship between the two, one that ultimately ended the Cold War.