Efforts to defuse the crisis in Ukraine via a frenzy of telephone diplomacy failed to ease tensions
US President Joe Biden speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin from the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland.WASHINGTON - Saturday, with US President Joe Biden warning that Russia faces"swift and severe costs" if its troops carry out an invasion.
Speaking after new phone talks between Putin and Biden, the Kremlin's top foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov told a conference call:"Hysteria has reached its peak."Weeks of tensions that have seen Russia nearly surround its western neighbour with more than 100,000 troops intensified after Washington warned that an all-out invasion could begin"any day" and Russia launched its biggest naval drills in years across the Black Sea.
While the United States was prepared to engage in diplomacy,"we are equally prepared for other scenarios", Biden said, as the two nations stare down one of the gravest crises in East-West relations since the Cold War.While the Biden-Putin talks were"professional and substantive", lasting just over an hour, they produced"no fundamental change" in dynamics, a senior US official told reporters.
But the US Indo-Pacific Command denied the account."There is no truth to the Russian claims of our operations in their territorial waters," spokesman Captain Kyle Raines said in a statement.
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