Biden-Putin, today summit at Villa La Grange

Today in Geneva the summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. The meeting will begin around 13 local time and will last 4-5 hours, including breaks, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov anticipated yesterday. Format changes are also planned for the talks which will begin in a restricted form and will then be extended to include delegations. The actual duration of the summit will depend on the progress of the talks and on the feelings of the two presidents, he added. Ushakov explained that US ambassadors to Russia, John Sullivan, and Russian ambassadors to the US, Anatoly Antonov, will take part in the talks and may later return to Moscow and Washington respectively if the presidents reach an agreement to this effect . The two diplomats had been recalled for consultations in their countries. Moscow recalled Antonov in March after Joe Biden spoke of Putin as a murderer in an interview. Sullivan had returned the following month, after the introduction of new American sanctions against Russia and the expulsion of ten diplomats. The summit in Geneva will be held in Villa La Grange, a large 18th-century mansion with a large sloping park. gently towards Lake Geneva, near the famous Jet d’eau. Donated to the Municipality by its last owner William Favre in 1917, it has welcomed important guests at international events. Already in 1864 Favre organized one of the meetings of the first conference of the International Committee of the Red Cross there. Located on a hill, with a magnificent view of the lake, the mansion has a perfectly symmetrical plan and was built between 1768 and 1773 by the Lullin family from Geneva. Inside, the eighteenth-century building consists of a ground floor in which the dining room is located to the north-east to benefit from a cooler temperature. There are also several halls, offices and a sizable library containing over 12,000 works. An independent staircase leads to the first floor, where a corridor serves several rooms overlooking the lake. There is still a basement and an attic. The internal decoration corresponds to that left by Favre. The villa with green shutters is surrounded by various ‘annexes’, including a barn, a stable, a canopy and a fountain with a pond. Everything has been preserved in its original layout. Imposing the safety device that will have repercussions on the entire city, so the authorities have asked citizens to work today as much as possible from home. The summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has been organized in Geneva a little less than thirty-six years after the historic summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev of November 19 and 20, 1985. The summit did not produce any concrete results, but the two protagonists gave way to a personal relationship that over the years would have been fruitful . So much so that the image that remains of that summit, which for many marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War, is that of Reagan and Gorbachev sitting, smiling, in front of a lit fireplace. The American president, who even two years earlier had defined the USSR as an empire of evil, said that Gorbachev “had a face that radiated warmth and style, not the coldness bordering on hatred that I have seen in most of the other Soviet leaders. that I have met until then “.