'War criminal': As Biden gets personal with Putin, US, Russia relationship hits a dangerous crisis Biden’s efforts to stabilize a volatile relationship with Russia have run into the same road block – Putin – that his recent predecessors have faced. When President Barack Obama met Putin for the first time, at Putin’s dacha outside Moscow in 2009, Putin launched into a 45-minute tirade of “every perceived injustice, betrayal and slight that he and the Russian people had suffered at the hands of the Americans,” Obama wrote in his memoir. Referencing Bush’s claim that he had gotten a sense of Putin’s soul, Biden later said he told Putin: “I don’t think you have a soul.”