War felt a little less inevitable Tuesday as Russia announced it was pulling back some troops from their positions near the Ukrainian border, but U. …
War felt a little less inevitable Tuesday as Russia announced it was pulling back some troops from their positions near the Ukrainian border, but U.S. and NATO leaders said they could not verify those claims and President Biden again bluntly warned the Kremlin of severe consequences if it started “a war without cause or reason” against its smaller neighbor. Mr. Biden used an afternoon speech at the White House to again urge his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to change course and deescalate what has become a tense, long-running military standoff between Russia and Ukraine. Russia now has more than 130,000 troops along Ukraine ’s border, including detachments in Belarus that Moscow says have been conducting routine exercises and soon will return to their permanent bases. Russian officials said that other troops in Ukraine ’s Crimea region, which Russia seized by force in 2014 and claims as its own territory, are also ending exercises. Just hours after those statements, Mr. Putin said after a three-hour meeting with visiting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that his country is open to another round of negotiations with the West, capping a whirlwind few hours that suggest Moscow may be looking to cut a deal short of war and that the invasion U.S. officials predicted could begin as soon as Wednesday may have been called off. “We do not want war in Europe…,” Mr. Putin told reporters after the private meeting. “We are ready to work further together. We are ready to go down the negotiations track.” Still, Mr. Biden made clear that Russia has a long way to go to defuse the crisis. He stressed that Washington would not simply trust the words of Mr. Putin or his top generals. Rather, he said, U.S. analysts “indicate that they remain very much in a threatening position.” After weeks of increasingly belligerent talks on both sides, the tone Tuesday appeared to be focused far more on diplomacy than arms as the best hope to end the crisis. Mr. Biden, who spoke with Mr. Putin and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy in separate calls over the weekend, at one point appeared to offer the Russian leader the broad discussion of a revamped European security system that the Kremlin has been demanding for months. While backing Ukraine ’s right to protect its territory and saying U.S. forces would strongly respond to any Russian move against NATO countries in the region, Mr. Biden added that his administration “has put on the table concrete ideas to establish a security environment in Europe.
