Vladimir Putin has already met five US presidents

Vladimir Putin has been in power since 1999. His meetings with US presidents are legendary. He’s also shaken hands with Joe Biden.

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Meeting with Bill Clinton

When: 12. September 1999

Where: At the APEC summit in Auckland (New Zealand)

“Corruption is destroying Russian society” (Clinton)

When Bill Clinton first met Vladimir Putin, shortly after his appointment as Russian Prime Minister, he was not particularly impressed. At least the US President noted that Putin was “a stark contrast” to Boris Yeltsin, the Russian President with whom Clinton got along extremely well. (Clinton’s fit of laughter in September 1995 in the White House, when Yeltsin, while drunk, insulted the assembled journalists as a “disaster”, will not be forgotten.) Perhaps, Clinton mused in his 2004 memoir, Putin was the bitter medicine that the former superpower needed: a politician who appreciates hard work and who gets the turbulent everyday life in Russia under control. At this point, however, Putin seemed to have forgotten the advice Clinton had given him along the way. Clinton said in 1999: “Corruption is destroying Russian society.” The American also emphasized how “extremely important” free and fair elections are in building a democracy.

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Meeting with George W. Bush

When: 16. June 2001

Where: In a castle near Ljubljana (Slovenia)

“I’ve seen his soul” (Bush)

After the meeting between George W. Bush and his Russian counterpart, anything seemed possible. He looked Vladimir Putin in the eye, said the American president after the first tête-à-tête in Slovenia, and saw the soul of a man he could trust. It sounded like the beginning of a wonderful friendship between men. 40 more meetings and seven trips to Russia followed, but by the summer of 2008 at the latest, when Russian troops marched into Georgia, Bush realized that he had been mistaken. After retreating into private life, Bush wrote in his memoir that Russia’s newfound prosperity had had a negative impact on Putin. “He became aggressive abroad and more defensive at home in terms of his merits.” Bush concluded that Putin was a proud man who loved his fatherland. This fits the anecdote that Putin showed the American president his dog Konni. The Russian-bred Labrador Retriever is said to be “bigger, stronger and faster” than Bush’s dog, a Scottish Terrier, who bragged Putin.

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Meeting with Barack Obama

When: July 7, 2009

Where: In a dacha near Moscow (Russia)

«I’m just an old security guard» (Putin)

When Barack Obama spoke to Vladimir Putin for the first time, he was not currently in the Kremlin – during Obama’s first term, from 2008 to 2012, Putin was “merely” prime minister under the then-President Dmitry Medvedev. And although Obama didn’t trust the new balance of power in Moscow, he still believed that he had some leeway to put bilateral relations on a new footing. Putin, however, was not interested in it. In 2011 at the latest, he let Medvedev appear – after he had advocated regime change in Libya. In Obama’s second term in office, which ended with the Russian cyber attacks on the US election campaign in 2016, there was no stopping the Russian president. In return, Obama imposed severe sanctions on the Kremlin. One of Obama’s advisers later said that the two of them lacked mutual respect. Indeed, the American often compared the Russian to a class flail. Putin, on the other hand, saw in Obama an intellectual with no down-to-earth roots. “I’m just an old security guard; you are a well-educated man, “Putin is said to have once said to Obama.

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Meeting with Donald Trump

When: 7th July 2017

Where: At the G20 summit in Hamburg (Germany)

“It’s going well” (Trump)

From the start, there was a shadow over the presidency of Donald Trump: the suspicion that the Republican had won the White House race only thanks to Russian meddling – and that he, or at least his advisory staff, would have known about this assist of the Kremlin. Although the latter suspicion could never be fully substantiated, Trump was confronted in his four-year term in office with the challenge of teaching his domestic critics wrong without provoking Russia’s foreign policy. His meetings with Putin were shaped by this balancing act. For example, at the G20 summit in the summer of 2017, Trump was servile towards the Russian and emphasized how well the talks were going. A year later, in Helsinki, Finland, he defended Putin against accusations that the Kremlin was partly responsible for his victory in the presidential election. And last year Trump said: “I appreciate Putin. He appreciates me. We’re good at it. ” Meanwhile, his government isolated Russia on the world stage and with a certain regularity imposed new economic sanctions on the regime.

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Meeting with Joe Biden

When: March 10, 2011

Where: In the White House in Moscow (Russia)

“I don’t think you have a soul” (Biden)

Joe Biden was the White House cleaner from 2009 to 2017 when he served Barack Obama. The longtime and urbane senator took on delicate mandates for which his boss had no time or no patience. In the spring of 2011, Biden traveled to Moscow to meet with then Prime Minister Putin. During this conversation, the American is said to have made it clear to the Russian that he was not interested in being nice. “I don’t think you have a soul,” Biden allegedly said to Putin, alluding to the 2001 Bush remark. Putin replied: “We understand each other.” Since his election as president, Biden has also publicly repeated this criticism. He agreed with a TV journalist’s assessment that Putin was “a murderer”. If there is a strategy behind this harsh tone, it is probably this: Biden wants to prevent himself from falling into the same trap that Putin set his predecessors. He doesn’t want to waste time building a personal relationship that then turns out to be unsustainable in the event of a crisis.