Biden urges Zelensky to accept direct negotiations with Putin
Joe Biden’s Administration has privately urged the Government of Ukraine to show signs of being willing to hold talks with Russia to end the armed conflict, given the risk of losing the support of other nations, the American newspaper ‘The Washington Post’ revealed on Sunday.
This request from the White House is not intended to push Ukraine to the negotiating table immediately, but rather is a calculated attempt to ensure that Volodimir Zelensky and his team continue to receive arms aid from Washington partners who are more dubious for the costs of the war.
So far Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has refused to consider direct talks with Vladimir Putin. His argument is that Ukraine would talk to Russia only if Putin is deposed, which is far from feasible given the current power structure in the Kremlin.
The ‘Post’ affirms, citing its own sources in the White House, that Biden believes that Zelensky’s refusal to start talks with Putin causes concern in partners in Europe, Africa and Latin America, where the effects of the war on the prices of Food and fuel are felt more intensely. The sources cited by the ‘Post’ do not reveal who these countries are.
Even so, leftist Lula da Silva is now in power in Brazil, and he has given indications that he would like to see a negotiated end to the conflict. The same thing has been said by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, another crucial partner of the US. Biden has not made US aid, the most important for Ukraine, conditional on negotiating with Putin. In Washington it is also feared that countries, such as Italy or Germany, will begin to show symptoms of “fatigue with Ukraine”, according to information published in the ‘Post’.
Unwillingness
a US State Department spokesman said in an email: “We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: facts speak louder than words. If Russia is willing to negotiate, it should stop its bombs and missiles and withdraw its forces from Ukraine… The Kremlin continues to escalate this war. The Kremlin has shown its unwillingness to engage in serious negotiations even before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”
In July, there was tension between Biden and Zelensky in a call in which the latter demanded more military aid from his partner in Washington, even reading him a list of weapons that he urgently needed. The NBC network revealed that conversation, and said that Biden regretted the recriminations, alleging the high cost for the US to maintain the supply of weapons to its partners in Kyiv, which has not diminished in intensity and frequency.
Recently, Zelensky has denounced that Iran is violating the sanctions of the US and the international community by supplying drones, unmanned aircraft, to Russia, which are used as kamikaze projectiles in attacks against civilians and infrastructure in population centers. “We know for a fact that Iranian instructors taught Russian terrorists how to use drones, and Tehran is usually silent about it,” Zelenskiy said recently in an address to the nation. The Ukrainian spoke on Sunday with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, to request new sanctions on Iran for supplying kamikaze drones to Putin.
For his part, Iran’s foreign minister said his country supplied Russia with a “limited number of drones” months before the invasion. But that minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, said that Iran has not received any confirmation that they had been used in Ukraine.
