Biden warning Putin against Ukraine invasion
Concern grows from Russian buildup of troops on border
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Friday pledged to make it “very, very difficult” for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to take military action in Ukraine and said new initiatives coming from his administration are intended to deter Russian aggression.
The president offered the measured warning to Putin in response to growing concern about a Russian buildup of troops on the Ukrainian border and increasingly bellicose rhetoric from the Kremlin.
“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.
Amid the mounting tensions, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters Friday that arrangements have been made for a Putin-Biden call in the coming days.
The Kremlin said Friday that Putin will seek binding guarantees precluding NATO’s expansion to Ukraine during a planned call next week with Biden.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said later that administration officials have “engaged in the possibility” of a Biden-Putin call.
“It certainly would be an opportunity to discuss our serious concerns about the bellicose rhetoric, about the military buildup that we’re seeing on the border of Ukraine,” Psaki said.
Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have also tentatively agreed to have a call next week, according to a person close to the Ukrainian president who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ukraine, the U.S. and other Western allies are increasingly concerned that a Russian troop buildup near the Ukrainian border could signal Moscow’s intention to invade. The U.S. has threatened the Kremlin with the toughest sanctions yet if it launches an attack, while Russia has warned that any presence of NATO troops and weapons on Ukrainian soil would cross a “red line.”
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told lawmakers Friday that the number of Russian troops near Ukraine and in Russian-annexed Crimea is estimated at 94,300, warning that a “large-scale escalation” is possible in January.
On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met face to face with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Stockholm to demand that Russia pull back troops from the border with Ukraine. Lavrov retorted that the West was “playing with fire” by denying Russia a say in any further NATO expansion into countries of the former Soviet Union.
Russia long has pushed for such arrangements, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said, emphasizing that they have become particularly acute amid the latest buildup of tension. “It simply can’t continue like that,” he said.
He charged that in the early 1990s the Soviet and Russian leadership received verbal assurances from Western leaders that NATO wouldn’t expand eastward, but the West reneged on those promises in the following years, which saw former Soviet bloc countries and ex-Soviet republics join the alliance.
Ukraine has pushed to join the alliance, which has held out the promise of membership but hasn’t set a timeline.
Psaki said the administration would look to coordinate with European allies if it moved forward with sanctions. She noted that bitter memories of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that had been under Ukraine’s control since 1954, are front of mind as the White House considers the way forward.
“We know what President Putin has done in the past,” Psaki said. “We see that he is putting in place the capacity to take action in short order.”
Blinken this week said the U.S. has “made it clear to the Kremlin that we will respond resolutely, including with a range of highimpact economic measures that we’ve refrained from using in the past.”
He did not detail what sanctions were being weighed, but one potentially could be to cut off Russia from the SWIFT system of international payments. The European Union’s Parliament approved a nonbinding resolution in April to cut off Russia from SWIFT if its troops entered Ukraine.
Such a move would go far toward blocking Russian businesses from the global financial system. Western allies reportedly considered such a step in 2014 and 2015, during earlier Russian-led escalations of tensions over Ukraine.
Then-Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said it would be tantamount to “a declaration of war.”
Putin and Biden met face to face in Geneva in June, with the U.S. president warning if Russia crossed certain red lines, his administration would respond and “the consequences of that would be devastating.”