EKO HOT BLOG reports that US President Joe Biden has vowed to hold a face-to-face showdown with Vladimir Putin but only if he agrees to pull out of Ukraine and end the war.
Mr. Biden said he was prepared to hear what the Russian despot is “willing to do” to end the bloodshed. But he insisted he would only meet Putin with the blessing of his Nato allies.
“There’s one way for this war to end – the rational way,” he said. “Putin to pull out of Ukraine, number one. But it appears he’s not going to do that. He’s paying a very high price for failing to do it.”
Speaking at a White House after talks with French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, Mr Biden added: “The fact of the matter is I have no immediate plans to contact Mr Putin.”
The US President then said he would “choose his words carefully”.
He said: “I am prepared to speak with Mr Putin if in fact there is an interest in him deciding he’s looking for a way to end the war. He hasn’t done that yet.
“If that’s the case, in consultation with my French and my Nato friends, I’ll be happy to sit down with Putin and see what he has in mind. He hasn’t done that yet.”
Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said: “We have official figures from the general staff, we have official figures from the top command, and they amount to (between) 10,000 and 12,500 to 13,000 killed.
“We are open in talking about the number of dead,” he added, saying more soldiers had been wounded than had died.
Last month America’s top general estimated that Russia’s military had seen more than 100,000 of its soldiers killed and wounded in Ukraine, and added Kyiv’s armed forces “probably” suffered a similar level of casualties.
Oleksiy Arestovych, another of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s advisers, claimed on Wednesday that the Russian death toll was around seven times that of Ukraine’s.
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