President Barack Obama is urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull back Russian troops from the border with Ukraine.
The White House says Putin called Obama on Friday while the president was traveling internationally.
The White House says Obama urged Russia to offer a written response to a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine crisis that the U.S. has presented. Obama and Putin agreed that Secretary of State John Kerry will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to discuss further steps.
Obama says Ukraine’s government is pursuing de-escalation despite Russia’s incursion into Crimea. He urged Putin to support that and to stop building up troops on its border with Ukraine.
The call comes as Ukraine’s government and the West are concerned about a possible Russian invasion in eastern Ukraine.
(AP)
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2 Responses
or he’ll huff and he’ll puff and he’ll blow their house down?????
He wouldn’t need to huff and puff if he wasn’t working so hard at shrinking the defense budget
Actually it’s possible Putin has overplayed his hand. Having reduced Ukraine’s Russian minority to around 15% and guaranteed that Kiev will have a government that hates Moscow, he might just have driven Ukraine into NATO and EU’s arms. His bellyaching that the USA and Europe pushed NATO eastwards ignores the fact that those states couldn’t wait to get out of Russia’s orbit – they have good reasons to detest Russia and its imperialism. So Putin’s next idea is that Ukraine must be federalized (so bit can drop off to Russia) and neutral. He really is in cloud cuckoo land.