U.S. President Joe Biden plans to personally press Russian President Vladimir Putin to expand the distribution of aid into Syria during their summit next week, elevating the U.S. role in preventing another humanitarian calamity in the heart of the Middle East and testing the president’s ability to extract concessions from one of the United States’ most prominent adversaries, according to three sources briefed on the plan.
The presidential appeal follows a March briefing to the U.N. Security Council by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Syria’s humanitarian crisis as well as a recent visit by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to Turkey to build support for the plan to expand aid deliveries across the Turkish and Iraqi borders with Syria. It represents a concerted, though limited, effort by the administration to reengage in a country that had fallen off the radar in the Obama and Trump administrations.
