Biden Ready for Summit Talks with Putin to Avoid Ukraine War, but Moscow Called the Move “Premature”
Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Feb 21: Even as French president Emmanuel Macron brokered summit meeting between the US and the Russian presidents as part of the last-ditch diplomatic gambit to avoid a war on the Ukrainian front looked possible, Moscow has called the move “premature” causing the world to await with a bated breath for the last word on the Russia – Ukraine conflict.
The Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov on Monday asserted that there was still no sign on ground of the Russian forces withdrawing from the border and that Moscow-backed rebels continue to shell Ukrainian positions. Interfax Ukraine reported that Reznikov said an invasion could be presented as sending in peacekeepers.
Earlier in the day following Macron’ efforts, the White House said U.S. President Joe Biden has agreed “in principle” to a meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as long as he holds off on launching an assault that U.S. officials warn appears increasingly more likely. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration has been clear that “we are committed to pursuing diplomacy until the moment an invasion begins.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are set to meet on Thursday in Europe — as long as Russia does not send its troops into Ukraine beforehand. “We are always ready for diplomacy. We are also ready to impose swift and severe consequences should Russia instead choose war,” Psaki said in statement. “And currently, Russia appears to be continuing preparations for a full-scale assault on Ukraine very soon.”
But Russia soon contradicted the move. Kremlin said it was too early to organise a summit between Putin and Biden, after Paris announced the possibility of a meeting to calm tensions over Ukraine. “It’s premature to talk about any specific plans for organising any kind of summits,” Kremlin spokesman Peskov said.
Russia on Sunday rescinded earlier pledges to pull tens of thousands of its troops back from Ukraine’s northern border, a move that U.S. leaders said put Russia another step closer to what they said was the planned invasion of Ukraine. Residents of Ukraine’s capital filled a gold-domed cathedral to pray for peace.
Russia’s action extends what it said were military exercises, originally set to end on Sunday, that brought an estimated 30,000 Russian forces to Belarus, Ukraine’s neighbour to the north. They are among at least 150,000 Russian troops now deployed outside Ukraine’s borders, along with tanks, warplanes, artillery and other war materiel.
The continued deployment of the Russian forces in Belarus raised concern that Russia could send those troops to sweep down on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, a city of about three million people less than a three-hour drive away. In Kyiv, life outwardly continued as usual for many on a mild winter Sunday, with brunches and church services, ahead of what Biden said late last week was an already decided-upon Russian attack.
A U.S. official said on Sunday that Biden’s assertion that Putin has made the decision to roll Russian forces into Ukraine was based on intelligence that Russian front-line commanders have been given orders to begin final preparations for an attack. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the sensitive intelligence.
The United States and many European countries have charged for weeks that Putin has built up the forces he needs to invade Ukraine — a westward-looking democracy that has sought to move out of Russia’s orbit — and is now trying to create pretexts to invade. Western nations have threatened massive sanctions if Putin attacked Ukraine.
The U.S. officials defended their decision to hold off on their planned financial punishments of Russia ahead of any invasion, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called passionately on Saturday for the West to do more. “If you pull the trigger on that deterrent, well then, it doesn’t exist anymore as a deterrent,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
Russia held nuclear drills Saturday as well as the conventional exercises in Belarus, and has ongoing naval drills off the coast in the Black Sea. The announcement that Russia was reversing its pledge to withdraw its forces from Belarus came after two days of sustained shelling along a contact line between Ukraine’s soldiers and Russian-allied separatists in eastern Ukraine, an area that Ukraine and the West worry could be the flashpoint in igniting conflict.
Biden convened the National Security Council at the White House on Russia’s military build-up around Ukraine. White House officials released no immediate details of their roughly two hours of discussion. “We’re talking about the potential for war in Europe,” U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said at a security conference in Munich, Germany, that saw urgent consultations among world leaders on the crisis. “It’s been over 70 years, and through those 70 years … there has been peace and security.”
Zelenskyy on Sunday appealed on Twitter for a cease-fire. Russia has denied plans to invade, but the Kremlin did not respond to Zelenskyy’s offer Saturday to meet Putin. After a call from Macron, Putin blamed Ukraine for the escalation of shelling along the contact line and NATO for “pumping modern weapons and ammunition” into Ukraine.
Macron, a leader in European efforts to broker a peaceful resolution with Russia, also spoke separately to Zelenskyy, to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and to Biden. Blinken intentionally raised the prospect of a Biden-Putin summit in interviews with U.S. television networks on Sunday, in a bid to keep diplomacy alive, a senior U.S. official said.
Blinken said Biden was “prepared to meet President Putin at any time in any format if that can help prevent a war” and the U.S. official said Macron had then conveyed the offer of talks to Putin — conditioned on Russia not invading — in his phone calls with the Russian leader.
Tensions mounted further, however. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued an advisory urging greater caution by Americans in Russia overall. “Have evacuation plans that do not rely on U.S. government assistance,” it warned. Immediate worries focused on eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces have been fighting the pro-Russia rebels since 2014 in a conflict that has killed some 14,000 people.
In the eastern Ukraine regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, separatist leaders have ordered a full military mobilization and sent more civilians to Russia, which has issued about 700,000 passports to residents of the rebel-held territories to justify any military action on claims that Russian citizens were being endangered. Officials in the separatist territories claimed Ukrainian forces launched several artillery attacks over the past day and that two civilians were killed during an unsuccessful assault on a village near the Russian border. Ukraine’s military said two soldiers died in firing from the separatist side on Saturday.
“When tension is escalated to the maximum, as it is now, for example, on the line of contact, then any spark, any unplanned incident or any minor planned provocation can lead to irreparable consequences,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in an interview that aired on Sunday on Russian state television.
On the front lines, Ukrainian soldiers said they were under orders not to return fire. The Russian military said on Monday that it had killed five “saboteurs” who crossed from Ukrainian territory, the latest claim fuelling tensions along Moscow’s border with Ukraine. “As a result of clashes, five people who violated the Russian border from a group of saboteurs were killed,” the military said in a statement, adding the incident occurred near the village of Mityakinskaya in the Rostov region.
Russia’s military said troops and border guards had prevented a “diversionary reconnaissance” group from breaching Russia’s border from Ukrainian territory and that five people had been killed. Ukraine rejected the report, calling it “fake news”, and said no Ukrainian forces were present in the Rostov region where the incident was alleged to have taken place. Interfax cited the Russian military as saying that Ukrainian armed vehicles had been destroyed.
Earlier, Russia’s FSB security service said a shell from Ukrainian territory had completely destroyed a border guard post in Russia’s Rostov region but had caused no casualties, the Interfax news agency reported. The incident occurred 150 metres from the border between Russia and Ukraine, Interfax cited the FSB as saying. Sporadic shelling across the line dividing Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the east has intensified since Thursday.
Media reports said Putin had called an unscheduled meeting of his Security Council. His spokesperson confirmed this while refusing to elaborate on suggestions of the potential for direct talks between Putin and US President Joe Biden.
The UK PM’s spokesperson said, “Intelligence we’re seeing suggests Russia intends to launch an invasion of Ukraine and in some way Putin’s plan has in effect already begun.”
