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Russia plays coy with Biden’s offer to meet with Putin amid tensions

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Russia on Wednesday turned a cold shoulder to to meet with President Vladimir Putin for an in-person summit as US ships steam to the Black Sea to counter Moscow’s increasing military presence in the region.&nbsp;​The White House said Biden extended the invite to Putin during a phone call Tuesday in which Biden warned the Russian leader not to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine and rebuked him for meddling in America’s elections. ​But Moscow remained noncommittal.“It’s still too early to talk about this meeting in tangible terms. It’s a new proposal and it will be studied,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that more talks would occur on the diplomatic level.“The sides are not yet planning a range of topics to discuss, there isn’t yet any preparation for this meeting,” Peskov said. &nbsp;Feelings are still raw between the Cold War foes after Biden last month referred to Putin as a “killer” who would “pay a price” for the election interference, and Moscow responded by recalling its ambassador from Washington.In Tuesday’s call, the White House said Biden “made clear that the United States will act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to Russia’s actions, such as cyber intrusions and election interference.”But one topic that apparently did not come up, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday, was the detention of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, recently .“While I don’t have more specifics of the president’s comments to read out from the call, I will just say that the status, the health, the well-being of Alexei Navalny is something that we raise frequently and through many channels with the Russians, and we have repeatedly called for an improvement in his treatment, for his release, through many of those channels.”Navalny, a leading critic of Putin, was twice poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent while traveling in Germany last year, and, upon his return to Russia, that human rights advocates say are trumped up.“The purpose of this call was to discuss, in part, the fact that there will be consequences to the actions of Russian leaders over the past several months, back into last year,” said Psaki. “And to also raise…our unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and concerns about what we see as aggressive behavior on the border, and also to lay out the possibility of a meeting in order to move toward a more predictable and stable relationship.”Meanwhile, Russian foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov invited John Sullivan, the US ambassador to Moscow, to join talks on Wednesday, while warning that the Kremlin would respond harshly if the US took any “unfriendly steps,” such as imposing sanctions.&nbsp;Russia has been massing troops and armored vehicles near the border with Crimea, which Putin illegally annexed in 2014, prompting sanctions from the West, and has moved warships and landing craft from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea.&nbsp;In return, the US sent two ships — the&nbsp;USS Donald Cook and the USS Roosevelt — to the area&nbsp;and they are expected to arrive as soon as Wednesday.The held live-fire drills on Wednesday, and the frigate Admiral Grigorovich successfully launched a cruise missile, striking a surface target, the Russian news agency Tass reported.&nbsp;Earlier this week, two Russian ships, the , conducted drills in the Black Sea and destroyed targets in the air, the news agency reported.At the same time, Ukraine’s military rehearsed repelling a tank and infantry attack on the border with Crimea in an area that has seen an escalation in fighting that has been ongoing since Russian forces began backing separatist forces after Putin annexed the peninsula.&nbsp;The Ukrainian military posted videos of tanks maneuvering and troops firing artillery.&nbsp;Amid the massing of military forces in the region, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russian state-run media outlets RT and Sputnik, said that war is “inevitable.”During remarks made in Russian on Tuesday, Simonyan theorized that such a conflict would not be a traditional war, but one waged through large-scale cyberattacks targeting power grids and internet service, according to media reports.With Post wires

Russia on Wednesday turned a cold shoulder to to meet with President Vladimir Putin for an in-person summit as US ships steam to the Black Sea to counter Moscow’s increasing military presence in the region.&nbsp;​The White House said Biden extended the invite to Putin during a phone call Tuesday in which Biden warned the Russian leader not to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine and rebuked him for meddling in America’s elections. ​But Moscow remained noncommittal.“It’s still too early to talk about this meeting in tangible terms. It’s a new proposal and it will be studied,” Kremlin spokesman...

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Russia plays coy with Biden’s offer to meet with Putin amid tensions

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