Ukraine-Russia crisis: Macron brokers Biden-Putin summit to avert war
President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have both agreed to attend a summit to be brokered by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, as part of his global trouble-shooting to avert possible war between Ukraine and Russia.
According to a statement released by the Elysee Palace Sunday evening, both Putin and Biden will attend a summit aimed at de-escalating the Ukraine crisis, and the leaders have agreed in principle, amid further US warnings that war is imminent.
President Macron has been engaged in last-minute diplomatic efforts to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine.
“Presidents Biden and Putin have each accepted the principle of such a summit,” the statement said. “Its content will be prepared by secretary of state Blinken and Minister [Sergei] Lavrov during their meeting on Thursday 24 February. It can only be held if Russia does not invade Ukraine.”
Macron spoke twice to Vladimir Putin overnight, for a total of nearly three hours, consulting Joe Biden for 15 minutes in between the two calls. Amid a rising sense of urgency, the second Macron-Putin call was announced well after 2am in Moscow.
The French president said he was seeking to establish a cease-fire in the east of the country, and that the two leaders had agreed to hold discussions in the hope of organising a leaders’ summit to review the future of European security arrangements. But the Kremlin account of the conversation focused on Putin’s allegations of Ukrainian escalation and shelling on the eastern front lines – claims contradicted by reports from the region. It did not respond to an offer of direct talks from Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president.
Moscow rescinded its undertaking to end military exercises in Belarus which were due to conclude on Sunday, and the Belarus defence ministry said the Russian troops would remain there indefinitely.
Satellite images showed more and more Russian combat units advance from staging area to within a few kilometres of the Ukrainian border, in many cases concealing themselves in forests. More than 150,000 Russian troops are estimated to be deployed around Ukraine, while substantial naval forces are off its Black Sea coast.
Biden had been planning to travel to Delaware for a family event on Monday, a public holiday in the US, but canceled the trip on Sunday evening. US news networks cited intelligence assessment saying that Moscow had issued attack orders to commanders on the ground.
The US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said: “Everything we are seeing suggests that this is dead serious, that we are on the brink of an invasion.”
He added, “…Until the tanks are actually rolling, and the planes are flying, we will use every opportunity and every minute we have to see if diplomacy can still dissuade President (Vladimir) Putin from carrying this forward.”
Earlier, the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, who also spoke to Macron on Sunday, warned that Russia plans to launch the biggest war in Europe since 1945 by attacking Ukraine in a “bloody and protracted conflict”. He said the west would use “all the pressure we can bring” to “make sure that this venture does not succeed”.
The chink of diplomatic light came after Putin spoke on the phone with Macron, his favoured western interlocutor, on Sunday morning, and the outcome, broadly confirmed by the Kremlin, suggests Putin might be willing to step back from the brink of a full invasion of Ukraine to allow renewed diplomatic discussions. If he is not, he is instead involved in an elaborate deceit of the French.
Under the plan, the French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, will meet his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in the coming days to work on a possible summit at the highest level with Russia, Ukraine and allies, the Élysée said.
Additional reports from The Guardian, United Kingdom
