Moscow: Russian President Vladimir Putin says he is prepared to keep negotiating over his security demands in Eastern Europe but has offered a stark warning over the possibility of a full-scale war between Russia and the West — using a five-hour meeting with his French counterpart to keep the world guessing about his intentions.
Putin said that proposals made by French President Emmanuel Macron in their one-on-one meeting at the Kremlin on Tuesday AEDT were “too early to speak about” but could create “a foundation for our further steps”. Macron, in a joint news conference with Putin after their hastily scheduled meeting, described the coming days as potentially decisive in heading off what the West fears could be a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We are in a situation of extreme tension, a degree of incandescence that Europe has rarely known in the past decades,” Macron said.
The meeting took place as US President Joe Biden hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House to coordinate a trans-Atlantic response to a potential attack on Ukraine, underscoring the intense unease in the West touched off by Putin’s enormous troop build-up around Ukraine’s borders.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reacts during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron after their urgent talks on Ukraine.Credit:AP
Biden said that Western countries would take a “united” approach to rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and he vowed that a controversial gas pipeline project designed to send gas from Russia to Germany would not go forward in the event of a military invasion.
Putin appeared to relish the attention — and signalled he was prepared to draw out the mystery around his next moves that has turned the Russian troop moves into the West’s most urgent crisis. The Russian leader is an avid geopolitical tactician, and the concurrent talks in Moscow and in Washington showcased his ability to force the West to pay attention to the Kremlin’s long-standing grievances over NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders.
He told reporters at the Kremlin that if Ukraine were to join NATO — a scenario Western officials characterise as a far-off possibility — a wider war would follow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and French President Emmanuel Macron, attend a join press conference in Moscow on Tuesday AEDT.Credit:AP
But whether that attention will be enough to satisfy Putin is far from clear. Some analysts worry that his engagement in diplomacy in recent weeks is merely buying time for his military to make final preparations for an invasion.
Putin said Russia was still working on a new written response in its back-and-forth with NATO and the US over the security architecture of Eastern Europe, predicting that the “dialogue” would continue even though he said the West had ignored Russia’s principal demands.
He said that if Ukraine were to join NATO — a scenario that Western officials characterise as a far-off possibility, but one the Kremlin describes as an existential threat — a wider war would follow.
“Do you want France to go to war with Russia?” Putin said in answering a French reporter’s question and claiming that a NATO-allied Ukraine would seek to retake Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014. “That’s what will happen!”
French President Emmanuel Macron listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin at their joint appearance. He’s headed to Ukraine next.Credit:AP
Putin saved his greatest ire for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Asked whether Russia would invade, Putin did not rule out the possibility. He insisted Zelensky needed to implement the peace plan negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015 — one that could give the Kremlin a way to influence Ukraine’s foreign-policy decisions.
“You may like it, you may not like it — deal with it, my gorgeous,” Putin said of Zelensky, repeating a crude Russian rhyme.
Macron was scheduled to fly to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, afterwards to meet with Zelensky to continue his shuttle diplomacy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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