President Joe Biden says his desire for a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin has not been diminished by the Russian president massing tens of thousands of troops on his border with Ukraine.
The U.S. leader, during a recent telephone conversation with Putin, floated a mini-summit amid tensions about a range of matters. His Russian counterpart has expressed interest, but Biden told reporters following remarks on a disappointing April jobs report that aides for both sides are working on a date and venue.
Should the duo meet this summer or in the following months, a top issue will be Putin sending nearly 100,000 Russian troops to the country’s boundary with Ukraine. Senior State Department officials say, however, that 80,000 are still there despite Putin pulling some back in recent days.
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Biden on Friday appeared to link the meeting request to his counterpart withdrawing some troops, telling reporters Putin’s show of force is no reason to pull the plug on a summit.
“It is not impacting my desire for a one-on-one meeting,” the U.S. president said. “You notice he had more troops before — he’s withdrawing troops.
“There are still troops amassed, but it’s less than he had a month ago,” Biden added.
Administration officials have said they read the Russian deployment as an answer to a series of Western military exercises in his backyard that tens of thousands of U.S. and allied forces will be conducting over the next few weeks.
Part of those events are specific scenarios designed to give the allied troops a chance to train together to take on a Russian force, Pentagon officials said this week.
“What we are attempting to do is improve our strategic transparency and alignment, something that hasn’t been done with this scope and scale since the 1940s,” U.S. European Command chief Gen. Tod Wolters said this week from the Albanian port city of Durres.
He was there overseeing an exercise of a forcible-entry amphibious operation. The allied event also will cover air and missile defense scenarios and other practice missions, all intended to make sure NATO countries can go to war as seamlessly as possible.
All alliance members have agreed to a pact that states if one member is attacked, all others will come to its defense. That raises the stakes for Russia’s aggression along the Ukraine border — and beyond.
“After today’s demonstration and after this exercise, each and every one of us are a little bit more responsive, a little bit more resilient, and a little bit more lethal,” Wolters said.
Meantime, Biden also questioned just how serious Iran officials are about talks with Western leaders about their nuclear arms program.
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“How serious and what they’re prepared to do are a different story,” he said when asked if he views the Tehran regime as legitimate negotiators.
