By AAMER MADHANI, JONATHAN LEMIRE and JAMEY KEATEN

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin next month in Geneva, a face-to-face meeting between the two leaders that comes amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia in the first months of the Biden administration.

The White House confirmed details of the summit on Tuesday. The two leaders’ meeting, set for June 16, is being tacked on to the end of Biden’s first international trip as president next month when he visits Britain for a meeting of Group of Seven leaders and Brussels for the NATO summit.

“The leaders will discuss the full range of pressing issues, as we seek to restore predictability and stability to the U.S.-Russia relationship,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement announcing the summit.

Biden first proposed a summit in a call with Putin in April as his administration prepared to levy sanctions against Russian officials for the second time during the first three months of his presidency.

White House officials said earlier this week that they were ironing out details for the summit. National security adviser Jake Sullivan discussed details of the meeting when he met with his Russian counterpart, Nikolay Patrushev.

The Kremlin, in its own statement announcing the meeting, said that the presidents will discuss “the current state and prospects of the Russian-U.S. relations, strategic stability issues and the acute problems on the international agenda, including interaction in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and settlement of regional conflicts.”

The White House has repeatedly said it is seeking a “stable and predictable” relationship with the Russians, while also calling out Putin on allegations that the Russians interfered in last year’s U.S. presidential election and that the Kremlin was behind a hacking campaign — commonly referred to as the SolarWinds breach — in which Russian hackers infected widely used software with malicious code, enabling them to access the networks of at least nine U.S. agencies.

The Biden administration has also criticized Russia for the arrest and jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and publicly acknowledged that it has low to moderate confidence that Russian agents were offering bounties to the Taliban to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The Biden administration announced sanctions in March against several mid-level and senior Russian officials, along with more than a dozen businesses and other entities, over a nearly fatal nerve-agent attack on Navalny in August 2020 and his subsequent jailing. Navlany returned to Russia days before Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration and was quickly arrested.

Last month, the administration announced it was expelling 10 Russian diplomats and sanctioning dozens of Russia companies and individuals in response to the SolarWinds hack and election interference allegations.

But even as Biden moved forward with the latest round of sanctions, he acknowledged that he held back on taking tougher action — an attempt to send the message to Putin that he still held hope that the U.S. and Russia could come to an understanding for the rules of the game in their adversarial relationship.

In fact, he brought up the idea of holding a third-country summit in an April 13 call in which he notified Putin that a second round of sanctions was coming.

During his campaign for the White House, Biden described Russia as the “biggest threat” to U.S. security and alliances, and he disparaged his predecessor President Donald Trump for his cozy relationship with Putin.

Trump avoided direct confrontation with Putin and often sought to downplay the Russian leader’s malign actions. Their sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump’s refusal to side with U.S. intelligences agencies over Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Weeks into his presidency, Biden said in an address before State Department employees that he told Putin in their first call that he would be taking a radically different approach to Russia than Trump.

“I made it clear to President Putin, in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions — interfering with our election, cyber attacks, poisoning its citizens — are over,” said Biden, who last week spoke to Putin in what White House officials called a tense first exchange. “We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia and defend our vital interests and our people.”

In March, Biden in an ABC News interview responded affirmatively when asked by interviewer George Stephanopoulos whether he thought Putin was “a killer.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Biden’s comment demonstrated he “definitely does not want to improve relations” with Russia and that relations between the countries were “very bad.”

Geneva, a rich, if mid-size, city on the banks of Lake Geneva, offers bucolic vistas of the Mont Blanc peak — the highest in Western Europe — and a reputation as both a hub for international institutions and an icon of Switzerland’s much ballyhooed neutrality.

Geneva became a leading crossroads of diplomacy in the postwar years of Cold War intrigue, an intersection where the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc met the American-styled capitalist West.

The city last hosted American and Russian leaders in 1985, when President Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev — a summit considered short on substance but critical in breaking the ice between East and West and fostering what would become mostly friendly relations between the two men through their tenures.

A Biden-Putin meeting there could revive the reputation of the city as a hub for international diplomacy, a far cry from the Trump administration, which largely shunned its globalist institutions like the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. Biden’s administration has re-engaged with both of those organizations.

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Keaten reported from Geneva. Associated Press writer Matthew Lee contributed.

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and MICHAEL BALSAMO

AP – Nearly one-third of federal correctional officer jobs in the United States are vacant, forcing prisons to use cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates.

At a federal penitentiary in Texas, prisoners are locked in their cells on weekends because there are not enough guards to watch them. Elsewhere in the system, fights are breaking out, several inmates have escaped in recent months and, in Illinois, at one of the most understaffed prisons in the country, five inmates have died in homicides or suicides since March 2020.

The Justice Department budgeted for 20,446 full-time correctional officer positions in 2020, but the agency that runs federal prisons said it currently employs 13,762 officers. The Bureau of Prisons insists that many of its facilities still have a full complement of officers who focus solely on maintaining order.

Decisions to use other staff as guards are based on a facility’s needs and are made to ensure critical positions are covered, the agency said. Staff members also may be pressed into duty as correctional officers “during irregular periods such as a pandemic,” the agency told The Associated Press.

For years, the Bureau of Prisons has been plagued by systematic failures, from chronic violence to high-profile deaths. But the staffing crisis is reaching a breaking point, and the pandemic hasn’t helped. Nearly 7,000 employees were sickened with COVID-19. Officers were sent to hospitals to guard inmates being treated for the virus. Four staff members and 235 inmates died.

Overworked employees are burning out quickly and violent encounters are being reported on a near-daily basis. At a prison in Illinois, there are so few staff that officers are sometimes forced to work 60 hours of overtime in a week. At a facility in California, a fight broke out among inmates soon after a teacher was sent to fill in as an officer.

The expanded use of that practice, known as augmentation, is raising questions about whether the agency can carry out its required duties to ensure the safety of prisoners and staff members while also putting in place programs and classes such as those under the First Step Act, a criminal justice overhaul that received wide bipartisan support in Congress.

“You can’t do programming, you can’t have safety, you can’t have a lot of things that make prisons operate without proper staffing,” said Kevin Ring, the president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

The bureau insists everyone working at its facilities is a trained, sworn correctional worker, regardless of position or job title. All 35,000 employees are told when they are hired that they should expect to perform law enforcement functions, the agency said, even if they are signing on as counselors or teachers.

But pulling employees away from other duties up to twice a week means they have less time to do their regular jobs such as teaching classes, reviewing release paperwork and providing vital inmate services.

“When they augment you, you’re not doing your job that you’re hired for,” said Jonathan Zumkehr, the union president at the federal penitentiary in Thomson. “If you’re a counselor, you’re not able to counsel the inmates. If you’re a case manager, you’re not able to do the First Step Act. Those are two days that you’re not going to get back.”

The issue came up when wealth financier Jeffrey Epstein took his own life while in one of the most secure jails in the country, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. One of the two prison workers assigned to guard Epstein the night he killed himself was a warehouse worker who was augmented to work as a correctional officer. Both were working overtime because of staffing shortages.

Union officials have raised the alarm about staffing problems, even holding a rally this week outside a medium-security prison in Mendota, California. But federal efforts to attract more workers with 25% recruitment bonuses have, so far, barely made a dent. Starting salary is just under $43,500, with some promises of making up to $62,615. But that’s much less than what even some other federal agencies are offering, not to mention competition from police departments, state prisons, oil refineries, factories and warehouses.

“We’re tired of the agency putting a price tag on our lives,” said Aaron McGlothin, the union president at FCI Mendota in California. “We’ve had staff members killed in the line of duty. We’ve had staff members injured in the line of duty. At what point do they realize they’ve got a problem to fix, and quit putting a Band-Aid over it?”

The bureau says it hired nearly 4,000 new staff members in 2020 — more than in prior years — and that more than 500 additional hires are on the way. The agency said it is offering retention incentives for hard-to-fill positions and to keep around employees who are eligible to retire, and holding recruiting events regularly.

The situation could become even more dire as federal prisons brace for an influx of inmates. Right now there are 152,376 prisoners in 122 facilities.

The Bureau of Prisons is ending contracts with private lockups — the Mendota prison was set to receive 400 inmates from a for-profit facility in Texas — and is likely to seek the return of nearly 5,000 people who were released on home confinement during the pandemic.

At the high-security penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois, where several inmates have been killed or killed themselves in recent months, about 20 nonofficer workers are augmented each day and officers are forced to work overtime in 16-hour days that sometimes add up to 60 hours or more of overtime per week.

Last week, the agency suddenly recalled correctional officers who had been temporarily reassigned to help out at some of the system’s most understaffed facilities. Bureau officials said those employees were sent to “locations experiencing staff shortages, for training purposes, and to provide additional security as needed” and the jobs were never meant to be permanent.

People familiar with the matter said the decision to recall the staffers was driven by cost-cutting and came after a blistering internal financial review. The people were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Bureau of Prisons would not say how much money was spent on augmentation in the past few years. Records reviewed by the AP show skyrocketing costs from both augmentation and overtime. At the federal prison in Beaumont Texas, officials spent $8.1 million on overtime last year. The overall agency annual budget is close to $7.8 billion.

The bureau said it must rely on overtime and reassigning other staff members “when an insufficient number of correctional officers are available to cover an institution’s critical custody posts.”

“This is not a new practice,” the agency said in a statement. “It is important to note that staff assigned to our institutions are professional law enforcement officers first, regardless of their occupation. All staff are trained accordingly and are expected to perform law enforcement functions during routine and nonroutine situations.”

But correctional officers say there’s a difference between patrolling the same cell blocks each day — keeping skills and senses up — and moonlighting there periodically.

The staffing situation in Beaumont is so severe that prison officials have turned to just locking inmates in their cells on weekends because officials do not have enough officers to guard the prisoners. Visiting at the prison has been suspended until further notice.

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Sisak reported from New York and Balsamo from Washington.

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