Russia has date for Putin-Biden talks
Russia and the US have arranged a conditional time and date for a fresh summit between President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden, over the coming days, the Kremlin revealed on Friday afternoon.
Moscow is now waiting for the American side to confirm, Putin aide Yuri Ushakov revealed. The discussion will be held by video-link, and will focus on Russia's proposal for new security guarantees that it hopes will end the expansion of NATO eastward and concerns about Western weapons deployments to Ukraine.
"We are looking at the possibility of such communication in the next few days," Ushakov said. "We have a specific date and time for the video conference. But it is better to wait for all the parameters to be finally agreed upon with the American side, and then we can make it official."
The plan for an online summit between the two presidents comes five months after they met in Geneva, in what was described by both sides as a productive meeting. Despite its apparent success, hopes for improvements in Russian-American relations appear to have been unfounded, and have significantly deteriorated since.
In recent weeks, rhetoric has worsened as the US-led NATO bloc has criticized Moscow for an apparent buildup of troops near the Ukrainian border, suggesting that an invasion is imminent. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied these allegations.
On Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Stockholm on the sidelines of an OSCE ministerial meeting. The talks were the highest-profile face-to-face Russian-American negotiations since Geneva, and ended after just 40 minutes, indicating that little progress was made.
