Efforts on Saturday to defuse the crisis in Ukraine via a frenzy of telephone diplomacy failed to ease tensions, with US President Joe Biden saying that Russia faces “swift and severe costs” if its troops carry out an invasion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed Western claims that Moscow was planning such a move as “provocative speculation” that could lead to conflict in the former Soviet country, a Russian readout of a call with French President Emmanuel Macron said.
Speaking after new phone talks between Putin and Biden, top Russian foreign policy adviser Yury Ushakov told a conference call: “Hysteria has reached its peak.”
Photo: Reuters
Weeks of tensions that have seen Russia nearly surround its western neighbor with more than 100,000 troops intensified after Washington warned that an all-out invasion could begin “any day” and Russia launched its biggest naval drills in years across the Black Sea.
“If Russia undertakes a further invasion of Ukraine, the United States, together with our allies and partners, will respond decisively and impose swift and severe costs on Russia,” the White House quoted Biden as telling Putin.
While the US was prepared to engage in diplomacy, “we are equally prepared for other scenarios,” Biden said, as the two nations stare down one of the gravest crises in East-West relations since the Cold War.
While the Biden-Putin talks were “professional and substantive,” lasting slightly more than an hour, they produced “no fundamental change” in dynamics, a senior US official told reporters.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated a US warning that Russia could stage a “false flag” incident to invade.
“No one should be surprised if Russia instigates a provocation or incident, which it then uses to justify military action it had planned all along,” said Blinken, who spoke with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov on Saturday.
The Russian Ministry of Defense added to the febrile atmosphere by announcing that it had chased off a US submarine it said had crossed into its territorial waters near the Kuril Islands in the northern Pacific.
The ministry said that during planned military drills, the Marshal Shaposhnikov destroyer had detected a US Navy Virginia-class submarine in Russian territorial waters.
When the submarine ignored demands to surface, the crew of the frigate “used appropriate means” and the US submarine left at full speed, the ministry said, without providing further details.
However, the US military said in a statement that “there is no truth to the Russian claims of our operations in their territorial waters.”
Putin began his afternoon holding talks with Macron that lasted almost two hours.
Macron’s office said that “both expressed a desire to continue dialogue” but, like Washington, reported no clear progress.
Moscow added to the ominous tone by pulling some of its diplomatic staff out of Ukraine, with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affaris saying its decision was prompted by fears of “possible provocations from the Kiev regime.”
“Right now, the people’s biggest enemy is panic,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on a visit to troops near the Russian-annexed peninsula of Crimea.
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