President Vladimir Putin said he was prepared to keep negotiating over Russia’s security demands in Eastern Europe but 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 on Monday to keep the world guessing about his intentions.
Putin said that proposals made by President Emmanuel Macron of France in their one-on-one meeting at the Kremlin 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 came as President Joe Biden hosted Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany 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 buildup around Ukraine’s borders.
Biden said Monday 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 signaled he was prepared to draw out the mystery around his next moves that has turned the Russian troop buildup into the West’s most urgent crisis. The Russian leader is an avid geopolitical tactician, and Monday’s 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.
Macron was scheduled to fly to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Tuesday to continue his shuttle diplomacy in a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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