“The goal was to protect against the risk of escalation,” officials said.
Secret negotiations with Moscow were conducted by the “right hand” of Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan with a Russian official to prevent a nuclear threat according to the Wall Street Journal.
According to the paper, President Biden’s national security adviser has engaged in secret talks in recent months with top aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to reduce the risk of a wider conflict over Ukraine and to warn Moscow against using nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, US and allied officials said.
The officials said US national security adviser Jake Sullivan was in contact with Yuri Usakov, Mr Putin’s foreign policy adviser. Mr. Sullivan also contacted his direct counterpart in the Russian government, Nikolai Patrushev, the officials added.
“The goal was protection from the risk of escalation and the maintenance of communication channels, and not the discussion of the settlement of the war in Ukraine,” the officials clarified.
The WSJ report follows a similar report from the Washington Post, according to which the US is urging Ukraine to show “openness” to negotiations with Russia, and to reverse its public refusal to hold peace talks unless it first abandons the power the Russian president.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, whom it did not name, the newspaper explained that the American exhortation is not intended to force the Ukrainian government to sit at the negotiating table. Rather, it is a calculated move aimed at Kyiv maintaining the support of other countries, where public opinion worries that it is fueling the conflict that will last for years.
It is noted that Putin is again playing the “nuclear terror” card, wanting to show that he is not bluffing out of expediency or desperation, due to the looming retreat of the Russian army in Kherson in southern Ukraine. In an apparent attempt to scare the international community, the president of Russia brought her example Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the conversation with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron.
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