US President Joe Biden has said he is ready to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine if Putin shows genuine interest in ending the conflict.
It is one of the first times since Russia invaded Ukraine that Biden says so explicitly that he is ready to talk to Putin, even if he still used enormous caution: he said that for now he has no plans to contact him, and above all he added that the Russian president, at least until today, has not shown any willingness to have a serious dialogue with the United States and with the West.
“As things stand, I have no immediate plans to contact Putin… I am ready to talk to Putin if Putin demonstrates that he has a genuine interest in trying to end the war: he hasn’t done so yet. If he were to, after consultations with my NATO friends, I’d be willing to sit down with him to find out what he has in mind. But he still didn’t do it. In the meantime, I think it is exceptionally important that we continue to support the Ukrainian people.”
President Biden on Putin: “It’s sick what he’s doing…I have no immediate plans to contact Mr. Putin…I’m prepared if he’s willing to talk, to find out what he’s willing to do, but I’ll only do it in consultation with my NATO allies. I’m not going to do it on my own.” pic.twitter.com/jl7I5FyGFw
—CSPAN (@cspan) December 1, 2022
Biden was answering a question asked by a reporter during a press conference with Emmanuel Macron, the French president. In these months of war, unlike Biden, Macron has contacted Putin several times, without obtaining any concrete results or even pledges of goodwill to start a dialogue on possible negotiations.
However, it is very unlikely that Biden and Putin will talk to each other anytime soon. The Russian president has so far shown no openness to dialogue, and indeed his army has been bombing Ukrainian civilian infrastructure for months, in an attempt to harm and terrorize the population as much as possible.
