The meeting dialogue will take place a few days before the US president summons 110 countries on December 9 and 10 to his Summit for Democracy, from which he excluded Russia and China.
The issues on the agenda of the dialogue between Biden and Putin are many: from the “unsatisfactory” bilateral relations to strategic stability, in addition to the situation in Iran, Libya and Afghanistan.
However, the most important remains the crisis in Ukraine, with Moscow’s request for “legal guarantees” against a new expansion of NATO into eastern Europe and the deployment of weapons on the border with Russia, a “red line “Which, for Putin, must remain insurmountable.
“Red line”
“I will not accept anyone’s red line,” Biden replied, having warned that he is “putting together the most comprehensive and important package of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Putin to proceed” with his plans.
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki anticipated that these are “relevant economic sanctions and other instruments” and warned that “it is NATO that decides who joins the alliance, not Russia.”
Meanwhile, the alarm of the intelligence services fuels tensions.
“The Russian plans foresee a military offensive against Ukraine at the beginning of 2022, with a scale of forces twice that which we saw last spring during the rapid Russian exercises near the Ukrainian border,” confided an executive from the Democratic administration anonymized The Washington Post, the first newspaper to reveal unclassified intelligence documents.
“The plans involve the extended movement of 100 battalion tactical groups with an estimated number of up to 175 thousand soldiers, in addition to armored vehicles, artillery and other equipment,” he added.
According to secret service documents, including satellite images, Russian forces are concentrating in four places – from the Smolensk area to Crimea, via Donbass – and there are currently 50 battalion tactical groups deployed, with tanks and artillery “newly arrived. ”.
Their movements around the border would be aimed at “clouding intentions and creating uncertainty,” he said.
Reports
The United States estimates that Moscow currently has 70,000 soldiers near the border with Ukraine, compared to the approximately 94,000 indicated by Kiev, but believes that they can be quickly doubled, also through the mobilization of reservists already underway.
Propaganda
In addition, he reported that Moscow has already launched a media offensive to prove the narrative that the Ukrainian leaders were installed by the West, instilled hatred towards the Russians and act against the interests of the Ukrainian people.
US sources, however, reiterated that Putin’s intentions are unclear and those intelligence documents do not show that he has actually decided to implement a war plan.
For his part, Putin is calling for a new European security pact, with legal guarantees that NATO does not extend further east, particularly to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, after the failure to fulfill verbal promises at the time of the collapse. of the USSR.
The Russian president is also alarmed by the US exercises in the Black Sea with strategic nuclear-capable bombers and the deployment of a US missile defense system in Poland and Romania.
Source From: Ambito
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