the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt two)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

As the meeting began, the leaders posed for the requisite photo session, along with Tony Blinken and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. They sat in the library surrounded by leather-bound volumes, a globe separating the pair, as if harkening back to the day when the world was divided into spheres of influence. Putin posed in the disaffected slouch that he reserved for occasions like this, a technique to distract from his own diminutive stature. Biden once described the pose to a friend as that of an “asshole schoolkid.”

When the press left the room, Putin’s body language changed. He suddenly seemed less diffident. The Russian press had spent months portraying Biden as a fragile old man, a piece of spin that Putin internalized. But when he greeted Biden, he seemed taken aback by his appearance. “You look good,” he exclaimed. It was an observation that he kept repeating. When Putin called Angela Merkel to deliver his postmortem of the meeting, he told her, “President Biden is very fit.”