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Ukraine standoff enters critical week with U.S., Russia pessimistic on diplomacy
“A very, very tense atmosphere remains,” the Kremlin said ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
President Joe Biden said Sunday that he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin may be looking for “things he cannot get” as he weighs a potential invasion of Moscow’s neighbor. With the latest U.S. assessment painting a grim picture of the situation facing Ukraine, Western leaders rallied in a bid to ease the crisis.
Biden’s comments to reporters on the White House lawn came hours after National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “an invasion of Ukraine could happen at any time.”
The U.S. and its allies have been sounding the alarm for weeks, with Russia massing more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders and issuing a set of bold demands that were largely dismissed.
But fears that Europe is standing on the precipice of a deadly new conflict have also prompted a flurry of diplomacy.
Despite Washington’s gloomy outlook, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Moscow on Monday for a high-stakes face-to-face meeting with Putin. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, meanwhile, will meet Biden at the White House for talks expected to center on Ukraine.
Macron will head to Kyiv on Tuesday, while Scholz is set to travel to both Russia and Ukraine next week.
Macron, who also currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, said in an interview with French newspaper Journal du Dimanche that he wasn’t expecting a major breakthrough but that it was essential to meet nonetheless.
“It is indispensable to prevent a degradation of the situation before building confidence gestures and mechanisms,” he said. “The geopolitical objective of Russia today is clearly not Ukraine, but to clarify the rules of cohabitation with NATO and the E.U.”
Macron spent the weekend coordinating with allies on the phone, including Biden, with whom he spoke on Sunday.
Russia appeared to agree that his efforts were unlikely to yield immediate results.
“The situation now is too complicated to expect decisive changes after one meeting,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a press briefing Monday.
“A very, very tense atmosphere remains,” he said, blaming Western leaders for ignoring Russian demands. “Instead, they prefer to discuss in a very exalted manner the problem of, as they see it, Russia’s impending attack on Ukraine,” Peskov added.
Moscow has repeatedly denied it’s planning such an attack, but there has been little sign of a thaw in anything — including the Eastern European ground.
A U.S. official with direct knowledge of the latest government assessment said that Russia has already assembled 70 percent of the forces it would need to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Were that to happen, the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, would most likely be captured in the early days of the invasion, possibly within the first 48 hours, the official said.
The rate at which troops and equipment are arriving at the border means Russia may be at full capacity to invade by Feb. 15, when the ground is expected to be optimally frozen for tracked vehicle movement through to the end of March, the source said, citing the assessment.
