WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin warned President Biden on Thursday that any economic sanctions imposed on Russia if it were to take new military action against Ukraine would result in a “complete rupture” of relations between the two nuclear superpowers, a Russian official told reporters on Thursday evening.A 50-minute phone call that Mr. Putin requested, and which both sides described as businesslike, ended without clarity about Mr. Putin’s intentions. He has massed 100,000 or so troops on the border with Ukraine, and issued demands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States to pull back their forces in the region, but apparently has not decided whether to order an invasion.Mr. Biden, for his part, “made clear that the United States and its allies and partners will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine,” according to a terse White House account of the call.American officials declined to discuss any of the substance of the discussion, insisting that, unlike the Russians, they would not negotiate in public. But both sides appeared to be trying to shape the diplomatic landscape for talks that will begin in Geneva on Jan. 10, and then move to Brussels and Vienna later in the week in sessions that will include NATO allies and then Ukraine itself.In Moscow, Yuri V. Ushakov, Mr. Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said the Russian president had conveyed Moscow’s expectation that the upcoming talks would lead to “legally formulated guarantees of security” for Russia. He added that the conversation had created a “positive background” for negotiations in January, but that no compromises had been reached.The conversation on Thursday appeared to be part of the maneuvering for advantage as the first talks approach. Mr. Ushakov said Mr. Putin warned that harsh sanctions would be a mistake, and that, as Mr. Ushakov put it, “in this situation, it’s better not to make such mistakes.” But he also said that Mr. Biden had observed more than once during the call that “it’s impossible to win” a nuclear war — something Mr. Biden has often said in public.While the tone of the call was constructive, according to the Kremlin aide, Mr. Putin repeated his claims that Russia felt threatened by an encroaching NATO. He said that Russia would “conduct itself as the United States would behave if offensive weapons were near the United States.”The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Ukrainian military to fund what it characterizes as purely defensive arms, including anti-tank missiles to repel a threatened Russian invasion. Russia has called those offensive weapons that threaten its own forces.An American official, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the call “set the sort of tone and tenor for the diplomatic engagements” to come in January. But he declined to “get into the territory of starting to negotiate in public,” saying that “whatever the Russian side has decided is its best tactic and strategy in terms of its public pronouncements, we really believed, based on past precedents, that it is most constructive to have these conversations privately.”Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin had radically different objectives going into the call. By massing troops on the border and then publishing two draft treaties that had echoes of Cold War-era demands, Mr. Putin created an international crisis and made plain his desire to wind back the clock 30 years, to just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He demanded that Ukraine halt its embrace of the West, that the United States and its allies halt all military activity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and that NATO freeze its expansion to the east and roll back military deployments near Russia’s borders.In Washington and European capitals, most of the proposed treaty language was immediately rejected as an effort to redraw the post-Cold War boundaries of Europe, and, with the threat of invasion, force Ukraine back into Moscow’s orbit.Yet despite Russia’s damaged economy and diminished capabilities, Mr. Putin is dealing from a strong hand: He demonstrated in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea, his willingness to pick off Russian-speaking territory. And he is confident that the United States and its NATO allies will not commit forces to the task of pushing back.But all that was true when the two leaders last spoke on Dec. 3. So they entered the second conversation on Thursday amid speculation that the Russian leader was feeling out Mr. Biden’s red lines ahead of the formal round of talks next month.A senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday that the United States assessment was that Mr. Putin had not decided By: David E. Sanger and Andrew E. Kramer
Title: Putin Warns Biden of ‘Complete Rupture’ of U.S.-Russia Relationship Over Ukraine
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/us/politics/biden-putin-ukraine-call.html
Published Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2021 01:07:50 +0000
Read More
Did you miss our previous article...
https://badpoliticians.com/us-politics/navy-fires-warships-two-top-officers-reportedly-responsible-for-sexual-harassment-investigation
UK PoliticsWorld PoliticsVideosPrivacy PolicyTerms And Conditions
