Biden and Putin shake hands before Swiss villa showdown: US president smiles at his ‘worthy adversary’ as their face-off on cyber-attacks, election meddling, Ukraine and Alexei Navalny begins
- Putin’s official jet, emblazoned with ‘Russia’ written in red Cyrillic letters, touched down at 12.26pm local time
- Highly-anticipated first presidential summit between the pair is taking place in a mansion overlooking the lake – a Cold War throwback to Ronald Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet strongman Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985
- Relations between the two sides are similarly cool – at their lowest ebb in decades after Putin’s outlandish cyber attacks against the US, aggression towards Ukraine and intervention in the Middle East
- Putin, who is known to roll in late to seek the upper hand, arrived before Biden – avoiding any early gaming
- Washington has been seeking to lower expectations amid the fanfare and buildup, despite Russian goading
- Moscow staged naval drills 300 miles off Hawaii at the weekend – its largest Pacific drills since the Cold War