French President Emmanuel Macron proposed a United States and Russia summit between President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, according to Agence France-Presse. Biden has indicated that he's supportive of this as long as Russia doesn't attack or move into Ukraine. CNN reported, however, that this could be misinformation from Russia, however.
There was a fear Sunday that Russians were moving closer to an attack as troops moved closer to Ukraine along the northwest border with Ukraine.
Macron and Putin held hour-long talks on Sunday afternoon. "Ukraine and Russia called for intensified diplomatic efforts to avert all-out war, each blaming the other for a sharp escalation in shelling on the front line separating Kyiv's forces from Moscow-backed separatists," AFP reported on Twitter.
Earlier on Sunday, however, NBC News reported that Russia gave the order to move forward with a Ukraine invasion.
Speaking to CNN, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman said that Putin likely gave troops the order to move into position, much like a "be prepared to" message. However, Vindmand also said that he thinks Putin is likely to invade.
He went on to say that oftentimes, because Putin seems to wave from one side to the other, people can cherry-pick simple events, and "we misread the trend lines and the trend lines over the tenure of Putin's rule — towards greater belligerence towards assertion of a privileged fear of influence and he'd change his mind based on whatever the environment is at the moment and part of that is driven by the fact he's not getting a great deal of push back from the west. We said well, maybe the Russians can still do better. They can still be democratic. We had a lot of wishful thinking about the direction of the country. We didn't take a cool appraisal and didn't push back on the turn towards aggression. We saw that unfolding in 2007, 2008 with the Georgia war. It just — we were too slow to realize the direction we were going. We were thinking 2002 as opposed to 2008 or 2014 and we still have some thinking about Russia today, I think."
See the interview below:
Vindman on Russiawww.youtube.com
