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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and now the Joe Biden presidency. We will be looking at how a 78-year-old president

will change America and we'll be asking if normalcy,

which is what he promised to bring, has returned to American politics. The answer, of course,

is no. I'm joined today by Owen Matthews, who is the Spectators Moscow correspondent,

and we're going to be asking, what does Vladimir Putin think about President Joe Biden?

Owen, in a very good piece on the Spectator World website yesterday,

you described the summit between Putin and Biden as a diplomatic nothing burger.

However, it's probably a good thing in a lot of people's minds that there was no great clash between the two leaders and that it went

rather more smoothly than people were anticipating. That's certainly true. It went smoothly. Both sides

stuck to their scripts. Biden actually managed to resist the urge to come down

like a ton of bricks on Putin, despite very considerable political pressure, obviously in the US,

to be tough on Russia, including hilariously from the Republicans, who, in a complete sort of irony-free

moment, having sort of cheer-led for Trump for years,

have now started accusing Biden of being soft on Russia.

So, of course, Biden could have been tougher on Vladimir Putin.

At his own press conference, actually, Biden was not very optimistic, so the meeting was cordial,

...