“The media scuffle was the most chaotic [I have] seen at a presidential event in nine years,” Anita Kumar of Politico said in a pool report. “Journalists pushed and shoved, yelling at each other to move but no one did... Both presidents watched and listened to the media scuffle in front of them. They appeared amused by the scene. At one point, Biden leaned over and spoke to the interpreter and smiled.”
Several minutes after that, Kumar wrote, Russian security pulled the red rope separating the press from the two presidents.
“Russian security yelled at journalists to get out and began pushing journalists. Journalists and White House officials screamed back that the Russian security should stop touching us,” Kumar said. “[I] was pushed multiple times, nearly to the ground, as many poolers tripped over the red rope.”
For the sake of fairness, it’s worth mentioning that the “journalist stampede” at the Putin-Biden summit wasn’t caused by American press, there were plenty of Russian journalists in the mob.
— Murad Gazdiev (@MuradGazdiev) June 16, 2021
The difference is that Russians stampede quietly, while Americans scream their lungs out pic.twitter.com/HBOH5vqRp4
All eyes are on Geneva’s Villa La Grange where Putin and Biden are meeting face-to-face for the first time in Biden’s presidency, with high expectations that the two world leaders will reach common ground on a number of issues of global importance, and ease tensions in bilateral relations.
