Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin will have a talk on the subject next week. Ukraine accuses Moscow of planning an intervention for 2022.
This Saturday it was reported that the presidents of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the United States, Joe Biden, will hold a telematics summit next Tuesday.
“It will be in the afternoon,” Dmitri Peskov, Russian presidential spokesman, told local agencies and collected by EFE.
The virtual conversation will take place after Putin proposed this week to NATO to sign a security pact to prevent Ukraine and Georgia from joining the Atlantic Alliance.
Putin, who met only once with Biden – last June during a summit in Geneva – specified that Russia needs “legal and binding security guarantees.”
He accused NATO of reneging on a promise not to expand into the former communist bloc in 1999 (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) and 2004 (Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia).
Biden expressed his interest in speaking at length by videoconference with the head of the Kremlin, whom the United States and Ukraine accuse of preparing for an invasion of the neighboring country by concentrating between 90,000 and 100,000 troops on the border.
Last Friday Biden announced that he is preparing “a series of measures” to defend Ukraine in the event that Putin decides to launch a military attack.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned this week that Washington and its allies would hit Moscow with heavy economic sanctions if it decides to attack Ukraine.
Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov confirmed on Friday that, in addition to the “unsatisfactory” state of bilateral relations and the implementation of the cybersecurity and strategic stability agreements reached in Geneva, both leaders will also address the international situation.
In particular, the current crisis in Ukraine, but also the situation in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and the Iranian nuclear program.
This week in Stockholm (Sweden), headquarters of NATO, the Ukrainian crisis was discussed in depth by Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who assured that Russia does not want a conflict.
In response to NATO not accepting Russia’s veto right for future entry into the bloc, Lavrov replied that Moscow has the right to choose the best way to defend its security in the face of an external threat.
Ukraine aspires to join NATO as the best defense mechanism against the threat of the Kremlin, which annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and openly supports the pro-Russian separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The conflict has left more than 13,000 dead.
Meanwhile, the Russian leader maintains that one of the “red lines” for the Kremlin is precisely the deployment of Western offensive weapons on Ukrainian territory.
Attack analysis
The announcement of the meeting between the presidents of the United States and Russia comes after the newspaper The Washington Post said, citing a government source, that Russia is preparing an offensive against Ukraine with up to 175,000 men in 2022.
Meanwhile, Kiev also warned that Moscow plans a major attack next month.
Moscow’s plans “involve a broad movement of tactical groups of 100 battalions with an estimated 175,000 people, along with tanks, artillery and equipment,” a US administration official told the Post on condition of anonymity.
Although the Pentagon told the AFP not commenting on intelligence matters, he said he was “deeply concerned by the evidence that Russia has made plans for aggressive action against Ukraine.”
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov estimated that Russia has about 100,000 soldiers near the border. Russia denies that it is concentrating troops on the border between the two countries.
“The most likely time to achieve just preparation for escalation will be at the end of January” next, Reznikov told parliament in Kiev.
The US president told reporters in Washington that he was putting together what he says will be “the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin to go ahead and do what the people want. it worries to him that it can do ”. (I)
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