Biden and Putin head into Ukraine talks with scant room for compromise

Andrey Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council which is close to the Foreign Ministry, said their positions were unlikely to be reconciled. "The only thing they can probably agree on - if it turns out to be a good conversation – is that everybody directly or indirectly engaged there in the situation should demonstrate restraint and commitment to de-escalate. But otherwise I see no way how Biden can promise Putin that NATO will not go east." 

A spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council said Washington wanted to avert a crisis and a negative spiral in the broader relationship through diplomacy and de-escalation. Some Russian and U.S. analysts have suggested the leaders could agree to set up de-escalation talks and the Kremlin has made clear it wants a new Putin-Biden summit next year.

While U.S. officials have repeatedly said they do not know Putin's intentions towards Ukraine, a Biden administration official told Reuters the United States believed one option he was weighing was a military offensive as soon as early 2022 involving 175,000 troops, armoured units and artillery. The U.S. estimated that half of those Russian units were already near the Ukrainian border, the same official said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said Moscow has no objections to that in principle. But Vladimir Frolov, a foreign policy analyst and former Russian diplomat in the United States, said drawing Washington into that process would look like a defeat for Moscow. Nor was he confident that Putin would settle for a vague promise of talks on the future security architecture of Europe.

"By demanding legally binding guarantees Moscow has narrowed the room for manoeuvre for its diplomacy, which kind of tells you they are not really betting on diplomacy to succeed," Frolov said. In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine's armed forces were capable of fighting off any attack from Russia as the country marked its national army day on Monday with a display of U.S. armoured vehicles and patrol boats.

"We believe that Biden is a big friend of our country. So far he proved himself as a person who sincerely wants to help Ukraine out of this senseless situation," said Volodymyr Pylypyuk, 71. But Ruslan Lapuk, a 28-year-old bartender, saw little chance of a breakthrough. "We have nobody to count on but on our own forces, on ourselves first of all," he said.