US President Joe Biden has said he has no intention of meeting Russian head of state Vladimir Putin at the upcoming G20 summit in November.
“I don’t intend to meet him. But if, for example, he told me ‘I want to talk about Griner,’ I would meet him. What I mean is that it depends,” the Democrat said on a television show. American CNN interview on Tuesday.
In August, a Russian court sentenced American women’s basketball star Brittney Griner to nine years in prison for drug trafficking.
Griner was detained on February 17 at a Moscow airport after cannabinoid oils, vaporizers and other products were found in her luggage, according to Russian authorities.
On the other hand, Biden stressed that he would refuse to “negotiate anything with Russia, on the basis” of any Russian claim to be “with part of Ukraine.”
Hours before Biden’s interview, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow is willing to “study” holding a meeting between Putin and Biden on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
However, Lavrov stressed that there is no formal proposal at the moment.
“We have said many times that we do not reject these meetings. If there is a proposal, we will study it,” said the head of Russian diplomacy, in an interview with the Rossiya-1 network.
Both the American president and the Russian leader are on the guest list for the annual meeting of the G20 (group of the 20 largest economies in the world), which Indonesia will host between November 15 and 16.
In the same interview, Biden said he thought Putin “is a rational agent who made a significant miscalculation” in thinking that “Ukrainians would welcome him with open arms.”
The Democrat also said he did not believe Russia would use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but said the threat, as Putin did, was irresponsible and could result in “catastrophic mistakes.”
Still, Biden avoided answering the question of what the US response would be in the event of a nuclear escalation of the conflict.
Last week, the US president said Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict puts the world at risk of “an apocalypse.”
This is the first time since the Cuban missile crisis at the height of the Cold War, Joe Biden stressed.
Source: TSF
