United States President Joe Biden said he would be willing to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin “if he really has an interest in deciding that he is looking for a way to end the war in Ukraine”.
Addressing reporters together with French President Emmanuel Macron, he stressed that Putin had not yet done so. The two men stressed that they would continue to oppose Russia’s war.
In response, the Kremlin said President Putin remained open to talks to “guarantee our interests”.
However, spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Moscow is certainly not ready to accept US terms: he said negotiations would not be possible until Putin leaves Ukraine.”
He made it difficult to find a mutual basis for talks, he said, by the United States’ failure to recognize “new territory” in Ukraine that Russia illegally claimed as its own in late September. President Macron made it clear that he agreed with Biden that they would never urge Ukrainians to make compromises “that will not be acceptable to them”.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Friday that the time has come to work for a just peace for Ukraine, but that Kyiv must come through independence and not surrender.
Meanwhile, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said on a visit to Ukraine that there can be no peace until Russia stops lying about what it is doing in Ukraine.
The Archbishop of Canterbury visited a bombed bridge in Irpin and the site of a civilian mass grave
Speaking in Bucha, where Russian troops are accused of committing war crimes by massacring hundreds of civilians, he said
A senior Ukrainian official had previously said that 10,000 and 13,000 of his soldiers had been killed since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24.
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Neither Ukraine nor Russia tends to release casualty figures, and presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak’s comments have not been confirmed by the Ukrainian military.
Last month, top US general Mark Milley said some 100,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded since the war began. Speaking to Ukrainian TV, Podolyak said Kyiv was “openly talking about the number of people killed”. He added that the number of civilians killed could be “significant”.
He also suggested that up to 100,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the invasion.
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said in a video speech on Wednesday that 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed. However, a European Commission spokesperson later clarified that this was an error and that the number referred to both dead and injured. Mrs von der Leyen also mentioned 20,000 deaths among the Ukrainian civilian population.
Following their talks at the White House, the US and French presidents issued a joint statement pledging “continued support for Ukraine in the defense of its sovereignty and territorial integrity”, the delivery of air defense systems, and plans for an international conference on Ukraine in Paris on December 13.
President Biden’s suggestion that he was ready to talk to the Russian leader came with a strong caveat, and his French counterpart said: “We will never pressure the Ukrainians to make unacceptable compromises. for them”.
President Macron spoke hours after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complained that European countries had so far offered nothing concrete on mediation. “By the way, Macron has regularly said over the past two weeks that he plans to meet the Russian president,” adding that Russia had received no signal through diplomatic channels. Lavrov called former US Secretary of State John Kerry a figure who in the past had been able to solve problems and engage in real dialogue
