The United States will only resume diplomatic contacts with Russia in the Ukrainian crisis if this country changes from attitude.
This has explained it by the Secretary of State of that country, Antony Blinken, at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleva in Washington.
For that reason, the US has canceled the expected meeting for this Thursday among the highest representatives of the diplomacy of both countries, Blinken and Evgeny Lavrov.
“Clearly, the idea of meeting with Minister Lavrov to pursue the diplomatic way does not make sense, because Russia has rejected diplomacy,” Blinken said.
“But, while we can do something to avoid something even worse, that affects all Ukraine, including its capital, and that causes a horror cost to the Ukrainian people, we will always try.”
The message that Washington sends, thus, is that only contacts will be resumed in the event that Moscow performs some kind of measure that indicates a flexibility of its position.
It is a possibility that today is remote.
Putin has sent all kinds of heavy weapons to the ‘colonies’ of him in eastern Ukraine, and now it only seems a matter of time that the Russian dictator invents an alleged attack by the Ukrainian armed forces to launch a brutal attack on that country.
Russia has 75% of its conventional forces – that is, not nuclear – on the border with Ukraine, with which that country is surrounded.
In the case that Moscow gives the order to attack, Ukrainian resistance, with very high its morality, will collapse immediately.
In the same appearance, Kuleva insisted on the message of the Ukrainian government that there will be no capitulation.
The Foreign Minister of that country stated that Kiev has two plans.
Plan A is diplomacy.
Plan B, “fight for every inch of our land, for each city and for each village.”
The declarations of Blinken and Kuleva were only two hours after the US President Joe Biden announced the measures of his country against Russia for this second invasion of Ukraine.
Among them is the shipment of more soldiers to the Baltic countries to protect them from a possible Russian attack.
The military will come from the more than 60,000 that Washington has in Europe.
Biden did not specify how many soldiers will be sent, nor when the deployment will be carried out.
The Baltic countries -Lituania, Estonia, and Latvia – are independent nations that the Soviet Union was illegally annexed at the end of the Second World War, and that at present they are part of NATO.
The Atlantic Alliance has detachments in them, with troops from different countries – among them Spain – to protect them from a possible Russian invasion like the one that is taking place in Ukraine.
In addition, Biden announced a series of economic measures such as retaliation to the Russian invasion.
The president of the United States forbade the financial institutions of his country from processing operations from two Russian public financial institutions controlled by the Putin Power Circle: The Russian State Development Agency, VEB, and Promvyazbank, a Bank Controlled by the Ministry
Defense of the country.
When choosing both banks, the White House has hit financial institutions controlled by the elite surrounding Putin.
In the coming days it is expected that there are more sanctions against individuals from the Russian dictator’s orbit.
The great question is whether the Putin himself will be among the sanctions.
Biden also announced that the US will prohibit the placement of Russian debt in Europe and the United States.
That, according to the president, means that “we have cut the access of the Government of Russia to the financing of the West.”
Moscow, he said, “can not be financed in the West or negotiating his debt in our markets or European markets.”
It is, in reality, a much less relevant measure than what the president’s rhetoric suggests.
The reason is that Russia barely has debt.
Its debt ratio in relation to GDP is just 20%, to a large extent because the Government of Putin has made a tremendous effort to not depend on external financing and, thus, reinforce its invulnerability to sanctions.
It is the “Economy of the Fortress”, as it has been called, and that Russia has been practicing for almost a decade.
