Andrew Osborn
Joe Biden pointedly asks Vladimir Putin about cyberattacks at summit
U.S. President Joe Biden asked Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday how he would feel if someone carried out a ransomware attack on Russian oil pipelines, a pointed question during their summit that illustrated the breadth of their disagreements. The query referred to a cyberattack that closed the Colonial Pipeline Co system for several days in May, preventing millions of barrels of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from flowing to the U.S. East Coast from the Gulf Coast. Both leaders described their first summit in a lakeside Swiss villa as professional, rather than friendly, and said they agreed to hold lower-level talks on cybersecurity and arms control and to send their ambassadors back to their capitals. But there was no hiding their differences on issues such as human rights, wh...
Russia calls U.S. decision to not rejoin Open Skies arms pact ‘a political mistake’
Russia on Friday called a U.S. decision to not rejoin the Open Skies arms control pact, which allows unarmed surveillance flights over member countries, a political mistake that strikes a sour note ahead of a summit, Russian news agencies reported. The United States told Russia on Thursday it would not rejoin the pact, which Washington left in November, accusing Russia of violating it, something Moscow denied. The original decision to quit the pact was taken by the administration of then U.S. president Donald Trump and Moscow had hoped that Joe Biden would reverse that decision. Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, was quoted by the RIA news agency on Friday as saying that Moscow was disappointed but not entirely surprised by Biden’s decision. “It certainly does not make us ha...
Russia calls U.S. allegations over Putin-directed election meddling ‘baseless’
Russia on Wednesday described U.S. intelligence allegations that President Vladimir Putin had likely directed efforts to try to swing the 2020 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump as baseless. A 15-page American intelligence report, released on Tuesday, added heft to longstanding allegations that some of Trump’s top lieutenants were playing into Moscow’s hands by amplifying claims made against then-candidate Joe Biden by Russian-linked Ukrainian figures in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. “The document prepared by the U.S. intelligence community is another set of baseless accusations against our country for interfering in American domestic political processes,” Russia’s embassy in the United States said in a statement on Facebook. “The conclusions of the report on Russia conducting...
