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Post by Admin on Dec 31, 2021 3:39:01 GMT
Joe Biden and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have exchanged warnings over the crisis in Ukraine during a 50-minute phone call that did little to lower the political temperature, according to their governments. Russia has alarmed the US and its allies by massing tens of thousands of troops near its border with Ukraine over the past two months. This follows its seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014 and its backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine. Thursday’s talks, requested by Putin, were the leaders’ second conversation this month but, the White House said, consisted of both men restating their positions – including Biden warning of severe consequences if Putin decides to invade. “President Biden urged Russia to de-escalate tensions with Ukraine,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, in a statement. “He made clear that the United States and its allies and partners will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.” In a conference call with reporters, a senior administration official added that Biden had laid out “two paths”: one of diplomacy and deescalation, the other of deterrence “including serious costs and consequences” such as economic sanctions, strengthening Nato’s force posture and military assistance to Ukraine. The Kremlin, meanwhile, insisted that Putin had used the call to issue a threat of his own, telling Biden that new sanctions could totally rupture ties between Russia and the US and represent a colossal mistake. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying: “Our president immediately responded that if the west decides in this or other circumstances to impose these unprecedented sanctions which have been mentioned then that could lead to a complete breakdown in ties between our countries and cause the most serious damage to relations between Russia and the west.” Ushakov added: “Our president also mentioned that it would be a mistake that our descendants would see as a huge error.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 31, 2022 17:50:24 GMT
U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being misinformed by advisers about his military's poor performance in Ukraine, according to the White House. The advisers are scared to tell him the truth, the intel says.
The findings, recently declassified, indicate that Putin is aware of the situation on information coming to him and there now is persistent tension between him and senior Russian military officials.
The U.S. believes Putin is being misled not only about his military's performance but also "how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because, again, his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth," White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said Wednesday.
Earlier, President Joe Biden said in an exchange with reporters that he could not comment on the intelligence.
The administration is hopeful that divulging the finding could help prod Putin to reconsider his options in Ukraine, according to a U.S. official. The official was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The war has ground to a bloody stalemate in much of the country, with heavy casualties and Russian troop morale sinking as Ukrainian forces and volunteers put up an unexpectedly stout defense.
But the publicity could also risk further isolating Putin, who U.S. officials have said seems at least in part driven by a desire to win back Russian prestige lost by the fall of the Soviet Union.
"What it does is underscore that this has been a strategic blunder for Russia," Bedingfield said of the intelligence finding. "But I'm not going to characterize how ... Vladimir Putin might be thinking about this."
Meanwhile, Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a 55 minute call that an additional $500 million in direct aid for Ukraine was on its way. It's the latest burst in American assistance as the Russian invasion grinds on.
Asked about the latest intelligence, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that a dynamic within the Kremlin exists where advisers are unwilling to speak to Putin with candor.
"One of the Achilles' heels of autocracies is that you don't have people in those systems that speak truth to power or have the ability to speak truth to power, and I think that's what we're seeing in Russia," Blinken told reporters during a stop in Algeria on Wednesday.
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Post by Admin on Mar 31, 2022 20:50:05 GMT
Trump Publicly Calls On Putin For Dirt On Biden 43,693 views Mar 31, 2022 In a new interview, former President Trump calls on Russian President Putin to release potentially damaging information about President Biden’s son Hunter. Those comments have sparked a bipartisan backlash. In an interview Tuesday, former U.S. President Donald Trump specifically asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to release information that Trump believes would implicate the family of U.S. President Joe Biden in financial wrongdoing. In the interview with the "Just the News" television program on the network Real America's Voice, Trump suggested that Putin might want to provide the information because he thinks it would harm the United States. “As long as Putin now is not exactly a fan of our country,” Trump said, the Russian leader might be willing to explain why in 2014 Russian businesswoman Elena Baturina, the wife of the deceased former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, made a $3.5 million payment to a firm Trump supporters have claimed is associated with Hunter Biden, the president’s son. “I would think Putin would know the answer to that,” Trump said. “I think he should release it.” Trump characterized the payment as having been made to the “Biden family,” but it was actually made to an entity called Rosemont Seneca Thornton. Hunter Biden was an original founder of the investment fund Rosemont Seneca, but his attorney said that he had no connection with or interest in Rosemont Seneca Thornton. “Hunter Biden had no interest in and was not a ‘co-founder’ of Rosemont Seneca Thornton, so the claim that he was paid $3.5 million is false,” the attorney, George Mesires, told PolitiFact in September 2020.
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Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2022 18:51:16 GMT
J.D. Vance was on the warpath. “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,” he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. “We don’t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.” Vance wasn’t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington. The audience consisted of over one hundred mostly younger conservatives, and he was sounding the alarm about not just foreign intervention, but about other conservatives — the worrisome resurgence of the Republican establishment. The event was the “Up From Chaos” conference, a self-described “emergency” meeting organized by the Trumpian wing of the GOP to grapple with the political fallout from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The young men, almost all of them soberly dressed in dark suits, and women, almost uniformly wearing dresses, listened attentively as one speaker after another warned about the perils of intervention for their very own lives. A return to the thinking that led to Iraq and Afghanistan could result in nothing less than World War III over Ukraine, they were warned. And so, as Putin’s deadly and unprovoked assault drags on, the GOP is also going to war — against itself. As so often, the battle revolves around the America First doctrine first espoused by former President Donald Trump in April 2016, during the Republican primaries, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where he promised that he would perform a U-turn in American foreign policy by shunning military intervention abroad. That promise never quite bore out. It was the Democratic President Joe Biden, not Trump, who ended up pulling American troops from Afghanistan. Throughout his erratic and volatile presidency, Trump never really gained control of his own national security advisers, hawkish thinkers such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton who managed, from the perspective of Trump loyalists, to subvert his nationalist foreign policy. But Trump did manage to shift conservative thinking about Putin himself, a powerful adversary of the U.S. who wields power with an autocratic strength that Trump and his followers openly admire. Even the invasion of Ukraine has not prompted Trump to alter his fundamentally adoring view of the Russian leader. The most that Trump would concede is that he was “surprised” Putin had invaded. Then Trump reverted to type, trying once more to game the Ukraine crisis (as he did in 2019 during a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to his first impeachment) for his own personal benefit by imploring Putin, during an interview this week on Real America’s Voice network, to release information about Hunter Biden’s nefarious activities. Though Trump’s view of Putin may be little changed, the Russian invasion has broken open the uneasy marriage between the followers of Trump, who abhor foreign entanglements, and the hawks of the Republican Party, who have rarely seen a war they didn’t want to enter. After the debacle in Iraq, the neoconservatives who champion a crusading foreign policy based on democracy promotion and regime change came into bad odor. But almost overnight, the hawks are mounting a comeback as a new foreign policy consensus forms in Washington around bolstering the alliance with NATO and standing up to Russian aggression.
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Post by Admin on Apr 4, 2022 18:08:13 GMT
Biden: Putin should face war crimes trial for Bucha killings
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday called for a war crimes trial against Russia President Vladimir Putin and said he’d seek more sanctions after reported atrocities in Ukraine.
“You saw what happened in Bucha,” Biden said. He added that Putin “is a war criminal.”
Biden’s comments to reporters came after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Bucha, one of the towns surrounding Kyiv where Ukrainian officials say the bodies of civilians have been found. Zelenskyy called the Russian actions “genocide” and called for the West to apply tougher sanctions against Russia.
Biden, however, stopped short of calling the actions genocide.
The bodies of 410 civilians have been removed from Kyiv-area towns that were recently retaken from Russian forces, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Iryna Venediktova, said. Associated Press journalists saw the bodies of at least 21 people in various spots around Bucha, northwest of the capital.
“We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue the fight. And we have to gather all the detail so this can be an actual -- have a war crimes trial,” Biden said.
Biden lashed out at Putin as “brutal.”
"What’s happening in Bucha is outrageous and everyone sees it,” Biden added.
White House officials said talks about ramping up new sanctions against Russia intensified after reports of alleged atrocities emerged. Biden said Monday that he would continue to add sanctions but did not detail what sectors the U.S. may target next.
After unveiling an avalanche of sanctions in the first weeks of the war, administration officials in recent days have put more focus on closing loopholes that Russia might try to use to avoid sanctions.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted Monday that the European Union will send investigators to Ukraine to help the local prosecutor general “document war crimes."
A Russian law enforcement agency says it has launched its own investigation into allegations that Ukrainian civilians were massacred in suburbs of Kyiv that were held by Russian troops, focusing on what it calls “false information” about Russian forces.
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