CNN reporter gushes over Biden's 'impressively productive' call with Putin

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Nikki Haley: Biden's first week as president is 'good' for Russia

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley argues President Biden is showing 'he's more interested in reversing everything President Trump did than being strategic in how we keep America strong going forward.'

A CNN correspondent lauded the "impressively productive" call President Joe Biden had with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, citing the eagerness of Putin to agree to a five-year extension of the New START nuclear arms treaty.

"It certainly does seem to have been very productive, in fact, impressively productive," Frederik Pleitgen said during a live dispatch from Moscow.

"It really seems as though it’s a whole different way of going about these calls under the Biden administration than it was under the Trump administration."

Pleitgen framed the extension of the New START treaty as a place Biden succeeded where former President Donald Trump had failed, but the Trump administration had purposefully waited until last year to begin talks on prolonging the pact and issued demands that were not met, such as China joining the agreement.

The deal limits nuclear arsenals to 1,550 strategic war heads but does not cover tactical nuclear weapons, a fact noted by critics like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

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As Pleitgen noted in the clip flagged by Mediaite, Putin was eager to accept the terms. He immediately signaled Parliament to ratify the agreement after ending his call with Biden.

Pleitgen noted in his laudatory report that he had to go off the White House readout of the call, which stated Biden and Putin touched on issues like Biden's support for Ukraine's sovereignty, the Solarwinds hack, reports of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and the poisoning of Putin opposition leader Aleksey Navalny.

"It certainly does seem to have yielded some very early and very quick results," Pleitgen said.

The credulous coverage of the new Biden administration has been part of a pattern for the liberal network over the past eight days.

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CNN's Brian Stelter has called White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki "refreshing" after a week on the job, White House correspondent John Harwood was widely criticized for tweet declaring "truth" and "knowledge" had returned, and climate correspondent Bill Weir declared Biden had pledged to "help avoid planet-cooking, climate-changing fossil fuel suicide."

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Trump was frequently pilloried for being too deferential to Putin after intelligence agencies concluded he interfered in the 2016 election to boost Trump, but the Trump administration also took aggressive stances against Russia, including pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement, bombing Putin ally Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria, authorizing multiple sanctions packages against Moscow, and encouraging NATO allies to bolster defense spending to counter Russia's malign influence.