Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US colleague Joe Biden held a two-hour video summit on Tuesday, Washington and Moscow announced. The focus was on the growing tensions in the Ukraine conflict. Biden then wanted to consult with several US allies.
The White House announced on Tuesday that the US President would speak to outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi after the summit. During their talks the day before, the allies had agreed “to stay in close contact with one another in order to develop a coordinated and comprehensive approach to responding to Russia’s military rearmament at the borders of Ukraine”.
According to the Kremlin, the video summit, which began shortly after 4:00 p.m. CET and lasted around two hours, was also about possible mutual security guarantees between Russia and NATO. Putin recently called on the western military alliance to end its eastward expansion and demanded written guarantees for this.
In the Ukraine conflict, Russia is also demanding an assurance that the US-backed government in Kiev will not launch an attack on the regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The Minsk peace plan agreed in 2015 continues to apply, it said in Moscow.
The US has been accusing Russia of deploying troops not far from the border with Ukraine for weeks. According to this, a Russian invasion of the ex-Soviet republic is feared in the West. Russia rejects this and accuses Ukraine of having deployed more than 120,000 soldiers on the line to the separatist areas.
As heads of state, Putin and Biden met in person for the first time in Geneva in June. The video summit on Tuesday also dealt with cybersecurity in both countries as well as the Iranian nuclear program and other international conflicts.
Russia annexed the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014. In the conflict, Moscow supports the separatists in eastern Ukraine, who have proclaimed so-called People’s Republics in Luhansk and Donetsk.
Source: Nachrichten
