U.S., fearing invasion, pulls Ukrainian diplomats
KYIV, Ukraine — President Joe Biden warned President Vladimir Putin of Russia invading Ukraine would result in “swift and severe” costs to Russia, diminish his country’s standing and cause “widespread human suffering,” the White House said Saturday as Western officials made a forceful diplomatic push to dissuade Putin from attacking.
It remained uncertain whether Putin would invade, according to senior Biden administration officials. But after the call, one official said the situation remained as urgent as it was Friday when the administration said Russia could invade at any moment, and Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, warned Americans to leave the country in the coming days.
White House officials said Biden discussed a range of diplomatic options with Putin, but it was unclear if Putin was persuaded to take that route.
A foreign policy aide to Putin, Yuri Ushakov, described the call with Biden as “businesslike” but overshadowed by American “hysteria” over a possibly imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. He said Putin would consider Biden’s proposals but they ignored Russia’s key demands for “security guarantees” in Eastern Europe, including a legally binding halt to NATO expansion and a pullback of the alliance’s military presence in the region.
And Ushakov continued to reject the idea Russia was threatening a war. “We have repeatedly underlined that we don’t understand why the news media should be given clearly false information about Russian plans,” he said.
The two leaders spoke only hours after the United States ordered most of its diplomats and other staff members to leave the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine amid mounting fears Russia’s huge buildup of forces on land and at sea around Ukraine signaled an invasion was imminent.
A senior Department of State official said Saturday the drawdown at the embassy, one of United States’ largest in Europe, reflected the urgent need for U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine immediately because Washington would have a limited ability to help them if the country became a “war zone.”
In a sign of the mounting anxiety, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a “temporary” repositioning of 160 National Guard trainers from Ukraine to
“elsewhere in Europe.”
The West’s diplomatic scramble continued Saturday. President Emmanuel Macron of France spent one hour and 40 minutes on the phone with Putin. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Austin made separate calls to their Russian counterparts Saturday.