Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Joe Biden could meet on June 15-16 for a mooted summit, but the final decision will depend on many factors, Kremlin Aide Yuri Ushakov said in an interview with the Rossiya-1 TV channel on April 23.

Biden called Putin and offered to meet to thrash out the differences just before announcing new sanctions on Russia’s Russian Ministry of Finance ruble-denominated OFZ treasury bills, among other largely symbolic measures, two days later on April 15.

While the Kremlin complained loudly about the new sanctions and expelled 10 US diplomats in a tit-for-tat retaliation, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov also made it clear that the proposed summit was still possible, tacitly acknowledging the new sanctions are mild enough so as to not wreck relations completely.

However, after more than a decade of sanctions, tough rhetoric and the constant demonisation of both Putin and Russia in the US press, clearly building new “constructive and stable” relations with Russia, as Biden has proposed, will not be easy.

According to Ushakov, signals are coming from Washington on the plans to hold the meeting of the leaders, Tass reports. However, he noted that there was no discussion on the summit at a working level. "Not yet [discussion at a working level] but the signal has been received, we will consider this," he said. "Of course, we will make a decision depending on many factors," Ushakov stressed.

The Putin-Biden meeting could be held "in June, and there are even particular dates," he noted, although declining to name these dates.  

Washington also seems happy with the way things are going. The April 15 sanctions were finely judged to make clear that the US could escalate, but not tough enough to actually cause any “economic damage.”  

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid down a tough new policy in his new rules of the game speech at the start of February and threatened to break off diplomatic relations if the West continues to use a stick and carrot approach towards relations with Russia. He set the bar at zero, but was careful to specify that Moscow would not accept any more “economically damaging” sanctions, giving the White House a little wiggle room, as for domestic political reasons, including US president Donald Trump’s perceived weakness on Russia, the Kremlin was apparently aware that Biden would have to impose some sanctions on Russia.  

While the April 15 sanctions target Russia’s domestic debt that is widely held by US investors and the OFZ are a crucial funding tool used by the Russian Ministry of Finance to fund the budget, a ban was only placed on US investors participating in primary market auctions, but not the “nuclear option” of an outright ban on US investors buying or holding the bonds. As bne IntelliNews outlined in an explainer the ban on primary markets will have no effect on the market for the bonds, but is scaling up the threat, as the bill also makes it easy for the White House to expand the sanctions and ban secondary market trading as well, which would be extremely painful .  

A Washington source told Reuters at the end of last week that the sanctions were “pretty close” to Washington’s hopes, according to a senior Biden administration official, as tensions appeared to ease between the countries after Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered Russia’s troops on the border with Ukraine back to barracks.  

"Our intention was to act in a proportionate manner, and to be targeted in our approach, and to signal that we had the capacity to impose far greater costs if Russia continued or escalated its behaviour," said Daleep Singh, a top White House international economic aide, in an interview with Reuters. "The results so far have been pretty close to what we had hoped for."

Despite his tough-man talk that Russia would be made “to pay a price” for its aggression Biden stressed at the time that he could have gone further, but didn't, and had no desire to escalate tensions. The courtesy call he made to Putin and the offer of talks just before the imposition of the April 15 sanctions is also seen by many as a return to traditional diplomacy. Biden also called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan just before announcing the US would acknowledge the Armenian genocide at the weekend for the first time – a slap in the face for Turkey, which has been denying the genocide for a hundred years.  

But Biden has kept a lot of powder dry with the mildness of the sanctions and has made it clear that more sanctions will be imposed if the summit fails to happen, or even if it goes badly.  

"They're just a tool that can advance a strategy by, in this case, creating leverage for a diplomatic process," said Singh. "In the case of Russia, the goal of that process is for a more stable and predictable relationship."

The Kremlin has denied US allegations that it meddled in American elections, orchestrated a cyber-hack that used US tech company SolarWinds Corp (SWI.N) to penetrate US government networks and used a nerve agent to poison jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.