President Joe Biden would be willing to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the White House said Sunday night, if Russia does not invade Ukraine first—but since Russia appears poised to do exactly that, the meeting is unlikely to happen.
“We are always ready for diplomacy. We are also ready to impose swift and severe consequences should Russia instead choose war. And currently, Russia appears to be continuing preparations for a full-scale assault on Ukraine very soon,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. French President Emmanuel Macron first proposed such a summit.
Any meeting between Biden and Putin would happen only after a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov planned for Feb. 24. But that meeting, too, may be preempted by a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Putin has called a meeting of his Security Council for Monday. On Sunday, Belarus announced that Russian troops would remain in the country after the end of joint military exercises. “Even before the exercises began 10 days ago,” The Washington Post reports, “Western military analysts warned that it could be cover for an attack force to invade Ukraine from the north and potentially encircle the capital, Kyiv, part of a large-scale, multi-pronged invasion from the south, east and north.”
An information war is in full swing, with Russia claiming that a shell fired from Ukrainian territory destroyed a border guard post. “Our military can only fire back if there is a threat to the lives of our military. We are not shelling,” said Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine's National Security Council. Ukraine said there had been dozens of ceasefire violations from Russia. Russia has also accused Ukraine of a “genocide” of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, which is false, but it’s a convenient pretext for an invasion.
When considering all of the claims made as the two countries try to win the information war ahead of the likely military war, the most important context is that one of these countries is on the brink of invading the other. According to Ukraine’s defense minister, “We are observing the Russian units, which number today 127,000 people on the ground component, and with the naval and aviation component 147,000 people.”
U.S. officials have said intelligence indicates Russia has sent its commanders orders to invade. On Sunday, Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov told CBS Face the Nation that "there is no invasion and there is no such plan." We’ll see.
