WASHINGTON: Sharp policy clashes over fugitive leaker Edward Snowden and Syria may be exacerbated by apparent personal animosity when President Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin come face-to-face in Russia this week.
Obama will arrive in St Petersburg on Thursday for the G20 summit, after canceling a one-on-one encounter with Putin in Moscow, as a string of policy rows ranging from human rights to geopolitics rage between the Kremlin and the White House.
The testy personal relationship between Putin and Obama, and the diverging policy agendas, have put paid to the "reset" of relations which Obama engineered with former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev early in his first term.
The G20 summit of developed and developing nations comes with many analysts diagnosing the state of US-Russia relations as at their worst since the end of the Cold War.
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