ANALYSIS - G7 Leaders Unlikely To Make Major Statements On Russia Before Putin-Biden Summit

BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2021) As Group of Seven (G7) leaders gathered in the United Kingdom for a three-day summit to discuss some of the most pressing global issues, including relations with Russia, political experts told Sputnik they hardly expect any major statements regarding Moscow ahead of the upcoming top-level US-Russia meeting.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden are scheduled to meet in Geneva next Wednesday. The G7 summit is taking place in Cornwall from Friday to Sunday.

Louis le Hardy de Beaulieu, a professor at UCLouvain University in Belgium, believes the G7 will not make "a big, detailed outing" on relations with Russia in order to give Biden "the necessary leeway to negotiate next week." As such, the final G7 statement will most likely reaffirm the position of its leaders, but nothing more, he said.

"Other leaders like [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel and [French President] Emmanuel Macron have important electoral deadlines and may want to stand out and say a little more, but I believe that everyone will remain on a certain reserve to leave the field free for discussion in the face to face Biden-Putin," de Beaulieu noted.

According to him, the summit's main goal is to rekindle US relations with its allies and ensure that the core US-Europe-Japan alliance has a coherent strategy in the face of rising powers, such as China, Turkey and Russia. Biden is also likely to use the G7 meeting to signal to his EU partners that they should increase military spending and buy more from his "store," de Beaulieu added.

The G7 leaders have their own strong positions regarding global issues, including relations with Russia, but everyone understands that a meeting between Putin and Biden requires a diplomatic approach, so they will likely abstain from making rash decisions, according to Tanguy de Wilde d'Estmael, a professor at UCLouvain University.

"It is important that personal contacts can be made between the two presidents and that they can get to know and gauge each other. In any case, for Biden and Putin, this is only the first contact. Apart from a general reminder of the positions in their final communique, the G7 will undoubtedly leave Joe Biden complete freedom to go further and lead to a regularization of relations," the expert said.

For Biden, the G7 summit will serve as a platform to advance American interests and help reach multilateral decisions, as it traditionally did before Trump, d'Estmael added.

At the same time, some have expressed regret that Russia was excluded from the group � which until 2014 was the G8 � making it hard to involve Moscow in informal discussions on such a high level, even if no palpable results come out of it, the professor said.

He stressed that the original idea was to bring Russia back to the community of nations after the fall of the Soviet Union, as the country shifted to a market economy. Moreover, Russia served as a link between the G8 and BRICS, which involves major emerging economies, d'Estmael said.