Entering a critical week in the standoff over Ukraine, neither Russia or the United States sounded optimistic about intensifying diplomatic efforts to deescalate tensions.
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.
The German leader has resisted pressure to deliver arms to Ukraine and urged “prudence” on potential economic measures against Moscow, raising fears Berlin may be a weak link in the West’s effort to present a united front in the crisis.
Ahead of his meeting with Biden, a senior administration official played down those fears and said the two leaders would discuss sanctions and the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany.
Macron said in an interview with French newspaper Journal du Dimanche that he wasn’t expecting a major breakthrough from his trip to Moscow but that it was essential to meet with Putin 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.
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It was unclear how the government arrived at the estimates; NBC News has not seen supporting documents.
Russia however, has decried the estimates as propaganda.
“Another masterpiece of U.S. propaganda war,” tweeted Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, on Sunday. “Unnamed officials, undisclosed sources, no evidence.”
The increasing sense of urgency from the West comes after Putin said last week that the U.S. and its allies have ignored Russia’s key demands in the standoff.
In a series of bold security asks, the Kremlin urged NATO to deny membership to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet countries and to roll back its military deployments in Central and Eastern Europe, claiming NATO expansion poses a serious threat to Russia.
They were largely rejected, but there has been a persistent hope that there may nonetheless be a diplomatic route out of the crisis. This week may put that to the test.
Associated Press, Tatyana Chistikova, Nancy Ing and Yuliya Talmazan contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
