Politics
Biden Says He’ll Make It ‘Very Hard’ for Putin on Ukraine
By and- U.S., Russian leaders have call in works, Kremlin says
- U.S. has shared intelligence showing Russian mobilization
President Joe Biden said he’s coordinating with allies in Europe to make it “very, very difficult” for Russian President Vladimir Putin to consider attacking Ukraine.
“What I am doing is putting together what I believe to be will be the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr. Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he may do,” Biden told reporters on Friday.
The statement comes as Russian and U.S. officials plan a call or video call between their leaders, perhaps in the next several days. Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin foreign policy aide, told reporters Friday that the session would come after the Russian leader’s planned trip to India Monday.
“The upcoming contact between the two presidents, which the Kremlin announced, will facilitate the stabilization of relations, a calming of the situation, which has become excessively heated in Europe and the rest of the world,” Anatoly Antonov, Russian ambassador to the U.S., said Friday, according to the official Tass news agency.
Putin’s deployment of as many as 100,000 troops and military equipment on Ukraine’s border has revived fears of war first raised in the spring, when the Russian leader made similar moves. While those tensions subsided following an April call between Biden and Putin, U.S. officials have recently shared intelligence with allies showing that Putin could order a rapid, large-scale push into Ukraine from multiple locations if he decided to invade.
On the sidelines of a meeting in Stockholm this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov of “serious consequences” if Moscow makes a move on Ukraine, where forces back by Russia have waged a low-intensity conflict since after they annexed Crimea in 2014.
Blinken said at a NATO conference in Latvia that the U.S. would impose “high-impact economic measures that we’ve refrained from using in the past” if Russia invaded its neighbor.
Russia has denied any plans to attack Ukraine and says it has the right to deploy troops within its own borders without interference from abroad. But Russian officials have also said they want security guarantees that NATO won’t expand further eastward and won’t deploy offensive weapons on Ukraine’s behalf.
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