Photo: archive, BGNES
Russian President Vladimir Putin has “already lost the war” in Ukraine, said his American colleague Joe Biden, according to whom Moscow will eventually negotiate with the Ukrainian counter-offensive in mind, France Press reported.
Biden said he expected the Ukrainian counteroffensive to lead to talks with Russia, adding that he did not expect the war to last several years.
“I hope, and it is my expectation, that Ukraine will make significant progress on its offensive and that this will lead to a negotiated solution at some point,” Biden told a press conference during a visit to the Finnish capital, Helsinki.
Ukraine will become a member of NATO, but not while war is raging between Moscow and Kiev, US President Joe Biden added. “The question is not whether they should or should not join NATO, but when they can and will join NATO,” he noted a day after the alliance summit in Vilnius, which did not present a timetable for the adoption of Ukraine.
Biden downplayed the danger of Russian President Vladimir Putin using nuclear weapons after new threats from Moscow over the possible delivery of Western F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. “I don’t think there’s any real prospect of Putin using a nuclear weapon. Not only the West, but China and the rest of the world have said, ‘Don’t go that far,'” the president said.
Biden joked that the leader of the Russian mercenary group “Wagner” Yevgeny Prigozhin could be eliminated after his failed rebellion against Moscow, saying he should “watch what he eats”. “God only knows what will happen. I’m not even sure where he is and what contacts he has. If I were him, I would be careful what I eat. I would look at the menu,” advised the US president.
He added that he was determined to do “everything possible” to free the American journalist Evan Gershkovich – correspondent of the “Wall Street Journal”, who has been in a Russian prison for more than 100 days. “I am serious about prisoner exchanges. I am determined to do everything in my power to free Americans who are being held illegally in Russia or elsewhere. And that process is underway,” he stressed at the press conference.
(BTA, Asen Georgiev)
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2023-07-14 05:40:00
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