How Russia and US will come to the table

Vast agendas

Pavel Sharikov, head of the Center for Applied Research at the Institute of US and Canadian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said cybersecurity could be one of the issues discussed at the possible summit.

He said Putin and Biden have vast agendas, and on each issue the two nations have "polar opposite approaches". However, if there is willingness for the summit to go ahead, this means there is a desire to hold productive talks, he added, while warning that events could unfold in an unpredictable fashion.

Steven Pifer, Senior Fellow and director of the Arms Control Initiative at The Brookings Institution, said Biden is the first US president since the Cold War to begin his term not seeking closer relations with the Soviet Union or Russia. There will be no "reset", he added.

In a published analysis, Pifer wrote that in his first 100 days in office, Biden has sought to distinguish his policy from that of his predecessor. He has indicated instead that he will push back against Russian "misbehavior" while seeking to cooperate in areas that advance US interests.

In phone calls to Putin in January and last month, Biden raised issues where US and Russian interests should coincide, such as arms control and strategic stability.

Pifer said that in addition to using arms control to manage their nuclear competition, the two nations presumably share an interest in blunting the nuclear ambitions of Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. As US and NATO military forces prepare to leave Afghanistan, neither Washington nor Moscow has anything to gain from chaos or from the Taliban returning to power, he added.

In The first 100 days: Breaking with Trump on Russia, Pifer writes, "The Biden administration believes that, even with US-Russian relations at a post-Cold War nadir, the two countries can do business on certain questions where they have mutual interests."

Perhaps that's what makes it possible for Biden to refer to Putin as a "killer" one day, invite him to a summit a few weeks later, and next day impose sanctions on sovereign debt.