Though Russia and the United States had a long history, the two nations became allies during World War II, according to History. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill both met with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as part of the Allied Powers, but the U.S. remained skeptical of Stalin and Soviet expansion into neighboring European countries after the war.
Suspicions held by both countries, an era referred to as the Cold War, lasted until the Soviet Union crumbled in 1989. This era included competitions between the two regarding the buildup of atomic weapons and even space exploration. In 1972 U.S. President Richard Nixon met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhney and the men signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty to work toward lowering the threat of nuclear war.
The next year in 1973 Joe Biden was elected to U.S. Senate, where he would remain for 36 years. For 12 of those years, he helped lead the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Meanwhile, under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Soviet control slipped as eastern European countries began eradicating their communist governments and the Berlin wall came down in 1989 (via History).
Former KGB (the Soviet Union’s security agency) officer Vladimir Putin joined the presidential staff of the new, post-Soviet Russia by the end of the 1990s. Given his high approval ratings, Putin became the interim president upon Boris Yeltsin’s resignation in 1999. He then won the presidential election a year later. According to Britannica, Putin aimed to create a strongly regulated market economy as president.
