Bilateral meetings between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterparts were a regular occurrence early in his tenure.<\/p>\n
But as tensions mounted between Moscow and the West following the illegal annexation of Ukraine\u2019s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and allegations of meddling with the 2016 U.S. elections, those became increasingly less frequent, and their tone appeared less friendly.<\/p>\n
READ MORE:<\/strong> Putin says he hopes to meet Trump as the White House presses for a peace deal on Ukraine<\/a><\/p>\n Here\u2019s what to know about past meetings between Russian and U.S. presidents.<\/p>\n Putin and Joe Biden<\/p>\n Putin and Joe Biden met only once while holding the presidency \u2013- in Geneva in June 2021.<\/p>\n Russia was amassing troops on the border with Ukraine, where large swaths of land in the east had long been occupied by Moscow-backed forces; Washington repeatedly accused Russia of cyberattacks. The Kremlin was intensifying its domestic crackdown on dissent, jailing opposition leader Alexei Navalny months earlier and harshly suppressing protests demanding his release.<\/p>\n Putin and Biden talked for three hours, but no breakthroughs came out of the meeting. The two exchanged expressions of mutual respect, but firmly restated their starkly different views on all of the above.<\/p>\n READ MORE:<\/strong> \u2018This is not about trust,\u2019 Biden says of talks with Putin<\/a><\/p>\n They spoke again via videoconference in December 2021 as tensions heightened over Ukraine. Biden threatened sanctions if Russia invaded Ukraine, and Putin demanded guarantees that Kyiv wouldn\u2019t join NATO \u2013- something Washington and its allies said was a nonstarter.<\/p>\n Another phone call between the two came in February 2022, less than two weeks before the full-scale invasion. Then the high-level contacts stopped cold, with no publicly disclosed conversations between Putin and Biden since the invasion.<\/p>\n Putin and Donald Trump<\/p>\n Putin met Trump met six times during the American\u2019s first term -\u2013 at and on the sidelines of G20 and APEC gatherings \u2014 but most famously in Helsinki in July 2018. That\u2019s where Trump stood next to Putin and appeared to accept his insistence that Moscow had not interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and openly questioned the firm finding by his own intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n His remarks were a stark illustration of Trump\u2019s willingness to upend decades of U.S. foreign policy and rattle Western allies in service of his political concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cI have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,\u201d Trump said. \u201cHe just said it\u2019s not Russia. I will say this: I don\u2019t see any reason why it would be.\u201d<\/p>\n Putin and Barack Obama<\/p>\n U.S. President Barack Obama met with Putin nine times, and there were 12 more meetings with Dmitry Medvedev, who served as president in 2008-12. Putin became prime minister in a move that allowed him to reset Russia\u2019s presidential term limits and run again in 2012.<\/p>\n Obama traveled to Russia twice \u2014 once to meet Medvedev in 2009 and again for a G20 summit 2013. Medvedev and Putin also traveled to the U.S.<\/p>\n Under Medvedev, Moscow and Washington talked of \u201cresetting\u201d Russia-U.S. relations post-Cold War and worked on arms control treaties. U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton famously presented a big \u201creset\u201d button to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a meeting in 2009. One problem: instead of \u201creset\u201d in Russian, they used another word meaning \u201coverload.\u201d<\/p>\n