President Biden said he pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin over alleged hacking, human rights abuses and other troubling issues in a historic first summit in Geneva on Wednesday, a session shadowed by the unprecedented deference to the canny Russian leader that President Donald Trump displayed for four years.

The meetings, spanning only a few hours in the Swiss lakeside city known as the "capital of peace," were too short to allow for much more than an accounting of both sides' complaints. Biden and Putin declared the event a success, mostly for their having met at all at a time when relations between the world's two greatest nuclear powers are at a post-Cold War low.

"I did what I came to do," Biden told reporters after the sessions, as he sought to claim the moral high ground and further an argument about the superiority of democratic values that he has made throughout his first foreign trip as president.

"I also told him that no president of the United States could keep faith with the American people if they did not speak out to defend our democratic values, to stand up for the universal and fundamental freedoms that all men and women have, in our view," Biden said.