Biden Expected to Offer Warnings and Alternatives in Call With Putin - The New York Times

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The conflict in Ukraine will be a major topic during a high-stakes video call between President Biden and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday.

President Biden is expected to encourage diplomatic de-escalation over the conflict in Ukraine when he speaks to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a video meeting on Tuesday. But Mr. Biden will warn Mr. Putin that if he orders the Russian forces poised at the border to invade Ukraine, Western allies may move to cut Russia off from the international financial system and seek direct sanctions on Mr. Putin’s closest associates, administration officials said.

The meeting, perhaps Mr. Biden’s highest-stakes leader-to-leader conversation since he took office more than 10 months ago, may set the course for Ukraine’s ability to remain a fully independent nation. In the month since Mr. Biden dispatched his C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to Moscow, Russian forces have encircled Ukraine on three sides and accelerated a cyber and disinformation campaign to destabilize its government, according to American, European and intelligence officials.

Administration officials would not describe the new diplomatic offers in detail, but they appeared to be an effort to alleviate Mr. Putin’s supposed fear that Ukraine is posing a threat to Russia by allying too closely with the West, buying American arms and taking advice from U.S. military officials.

But some of Mr. Biden’s aides are doubtful there is any diplomatic process they can offer Mr. Putin that would dissuade him from his fundamental goal of destabilizing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pro-Western government in Ukraine. While the troop movements are easily visible on satellite images, Russia is already employing a familiar campaign of disinformation, cyberattacks and military intimidation to unseat the country’s leadership. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Tuesday’s call.

Mr. Burns was sent in part because he was the American ambassador to Moscow during Mr. Putin’s rise to power and is well known to Russian officials. But his warnings to the Russian leader, whom he reportedly spoke to by phone, appear to have been largely ignored, officials say.

A senior American official told reporters in a briefing on Monday that the official U.S. assessment is still that Mr. Putin has not decided whether to conduct a full-scale invasion. But Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, officials say, come to the conversation on Tuesday, which both men signaled they wanted, with very different agendas.

White House officials have been gaming out a series of scenarios with Mr. Biden, including that Mr. Putin has demands that go well beyond the familiar one that Ukraine can never join NATO. They include a reorientation of Ukraine away from the West and back into Moscow’s orbit.

Mr. Biden must convince Mr. Putin that the administration’s commitment to Ukraine, which it has called “unshakable,” is deep enough to cause tremendous economic pain to Russia — even if, as both men know, American forces would not come directly to Ukraine’s aid. Under discussion are steps as extreme as cutting off Russia’s access to the international financial settlement system, called SWIFT, and a series of restrictions on its banks like those honed in the effort to impose sanctions on Iran.

Russian forces are already deployed in the northeast, the south and the west, suggesting that Mr. Putin is putting together all the elements of a combined ground, cyber and information warfare campaign. The moves have prompted emergency meetings from Brussels to Washington — which may have been precisely what Mr. Putin intended.

At the Pentagon on Monday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III convened top military and civilian officials, including Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Tod D. Wolters, the head of the military’s European Command, to discuss the Russian troop buildup. Officials said that there was an effort underway to send additional defensive weapons, including anti-tank Javelins, to Ukraine, but that they may be pre-positioned outside the country to avoid giving Mr. Putin a pretext for military action.

Later on Monday, General Milley met virtually with his NATO military counterparts to discuss the crisis. Mr. Biden was also calling Mr. Zelensky ahead of the meeting, and he spoke with President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke with Mr. Zelensky on Monday and “reiterated the United States’ unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression,” a State Department spokesman, Ned Price, said in a statement.

John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, declined to say whether the United States still had a small number of military advisers in Ukraine or whether the administration had decided to send additional military assistance to Ukraine.

But Mr. Kirby said the administration was focused on resolving the crisis through diplomatic measures.

“We don’t believe conflict is inevitable here,” he told reporters.

But other officials said they were already seeing heightened cyberaction, and some officials recalled that Russia cut off the electric power to two parts of Ukraine in past years — and most likely had the capability for further disruptions now.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken, who traveled to a NATO meeting last week, have been working to convince European nations, starting with Germany, that a clear warning to Mr. Putin is needed. The effort is to present Mr. Putin with a united front, and persuade him that the sanctions he would suffer would be widely enforced.

But many European officials are clearly worried that Mr. Putin could respond to pressure by diminishing gas supplies to Europe as winter approaches.

Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine

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A brewing conflict. Antagonism between Ukraine and Russia has been simmering since 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, annexing Crimea and whipping up a rebellion in the east. A tenuous cease-fire was reached in 2015, but peace has been elusive.

A spike in hostilities. Russia has recently been building up forces near its border with Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s rhetoric toward its neighbor has hardened. Concern grew in late October, when Ukraine used an armed drone to attack a howitzer operated by Russian-backed separatists.

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.

A measured approach. President Biden has said he is seeking a stable relationship with Russia. So far, his administration is focusing on maintaining a dialogue with Moscow, while seeking to develop deterrence measures in concert with European countries.

Some administration officials believe that Mr. Putin views Mr. Biden as distracted, focused on Covid-19 at home and China abroad. He may see his chance to reconstitute pieces of the old Soviet Union, they fear, at a moment when Germany is changing leadership and France is facing an election. Inside the administration, there is concern Mr. Putin may try to use Belarus, whose leader is clinging to power and appears increasingly aligned with Mr. Putin, as a pathway to move against Kyiv.

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, on Monday dismissed warnings of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine as “aggressive and hostile rhetoric” by the West.

He said the Kremlin was expecting to hear “concrete proposals” on Ukraine from Mr. Biden during Tuesday’s meeting. Mr. Putin has demanded “long-term security guarantees” for Russia in Eastern Europe, such as a pledge to roll back Western military cooperation with Ukraine.

“President Putin will listen to those proposals with great interest, and it will be possible to understand how much they are able to reduce tensions,” Mr. Peskov said on Russian state television on Monday, according to the Interfax news agency.

Mr. Peskov appeared on television from New Delhi, where Mr. Putin was holding talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India — a visit that served as a reminder of Russia’s efforts to build relationships around the world even as ties have worsened with the West. Mr. Peskov said that despite the flaring tensions over Ukraine, there was still some positive momentum in the relationship with Washington, with talks between American and Russian officials on matters like arms control and cybersecurity gaining pace in recent months.

“Although our bilateral relations remain in a very lamentable state, they have nonetheless begun reviving in some areas, and dialogue is starting,” Mr. Peskov said.

And in fact, administration officials said there would be at least three other major items on the agenda of the video meeting on Tuesday: a follow-up on the cyberissues that dominated the summit of the two men in June, “strategic stability” talks about American and Russian moves in nuclear weapons and in space, and the effort to get Iran back into the 2015 nuclear deal.

But it is Ukraine — and the effort by the two men to divine each other’s intentions — that will dominate the session.

A declassified assessment disclosed by the Biden administration late last week, in an effort to shore up opposition inside Russia to Mr. Putin’s plans, suggested that by January he may have as many as 175,000 troops on the border — up from roughly 100,000 now. But some military and intelligence officials believe that the figure may go higher, as Mr. Putin distributes his forces in a way to suggest he could try a three-sided “pincer” invasion of the country.

In the briefing for reporters, the senior administration official also said there had been a “significant spike in social media pushing Russian propaganda” that followed the pattern of Russian actions in 2014, just before the invasion and annexation of Crimea.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Moscow.

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