Putin to ask Biden for guarantees over Ukraine

The Kremlin said Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will seek binding guarantees precluding NATO’s expansion to Ukraine during a planned call with U.S. President Joe Biden, while the Ukrainian defence minister warned Russia could invade his country next month.

With tensions between Russia and the West escalating, Biden said his administration was “putting together what I believe to 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.”

“But that’s in play right now,” he told reporters in Washington.

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.

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, adding that the date will be announced after Moscow and Washington finalize details.

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met face-toface 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.

Ukraine has pushed to join the alliance, which has held out the promise of membership but hasn’t set a timeline.

Ushakov noted that during the call with Biden, Putin will raise his demand for a legally binding agreement that would “exclude any further NATO expansion eastward and the deployment of weapons systems that would threaten us on the territories of neighbouring countries, including Ukraine.”

Russia long has pushed for such arrangements, Ushakov said, emphasizing that they have become particularly acute amid the latest buildup of tension.

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 exSoviet republics join the alliance.

Russia and Ukraine have been in a tense tug of war since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in the Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland. More than 14,000 people have died in the fighting.

Ukraine’s defence minister Reznikov warned Friday that an escalation “is a probable scenario, but not certain, and our task is to avert it.”

Konstantin Kosachev, a deputy speaker of the upper house of parliament, reaffirmed Moscow’s denial that it was pondering an attack.

“There is no preparation underway for an offensive,” Kosachev told state TV channel Russia-24.