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US president Biden and Russian President Putin came away with agreements after their meeting yesterday, while the Biden administration has canceled $500M in student debt, and more top stories in Democratic politics.
US president Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held three hours’ worth of meetings and two separate press conferences in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday, PBS reported.
Following the summit, Biden gave reporters a brief summary of the results of the face-to-face sit-down.
“It was important to meet in person so there could be no mistake about or misrepresentations about what I wanted to communicate,” Biden said. “I did what I came to do.”
“The bottom line is I told President Putin that we need to have some basic rules of the road that we can all abide by,” Biden continued.
Both leaders said they discussed cybersecurity, nuclear weapons, human rights concerns, diplomacy, and Ukraine. While the two camps said they came away with agreements, not many details were revealed.
One item Biden elaborated on was revealing he gave Putin a list of 16 critical infrastructures in the U.S. that “should be off limits to [cyber] attack.”
Biden said he warned Putin that the US has “significant cyber capability.”
“If in fact they [Russia] violate these basic norms,” Biden warned, “we will respond.”
Likewise, President Putin characterized the exchange as “very constructive,” adding he didn’t think there was “any kind of hostility” between the two delegations, USA Today reported.
“We believe the U.S. side is determined to look at solutions,” Putin said.
The Russian President told reporters the two countries will begin consultations on cybersecurity while denying any responsibility for the surge of cyberattacks on US institutions.
According to US intelligence, Russian intelligence was behind the “SolarWinds” hack last year, one of the worst cyberattacks in history, penetrating 18,000 public and private organizations.
The department of education under the Biden administration is counseling $500 million in student debt for those deemed to have been caught up in for-profit school fraud.
The debt forgiveness will be applied to 18,000 former ITT Tech students defrauded by the now-defunct for-profit college, CNN reported.
According to reports, there is a backlog of over 100,000 forgiveness claims still left over from the Trump administration.
The announcement of debt forgiveness comes three months after the Biden administration pledged to cancel $1 billion in student loan debt for roughly 73,000 students who were defrauded and deemed eligible for the relief under former Education Secretary Betsy Devos. The same students received only partial loan forgiveness after Devos revised the cancellation calculation.
