It rarely happens that a Russian president speaks directly to a CIA director. And when it happens there is a good reason.
It happened last week between Vladimir Putin and William Burns . A phone call, the Kremlin confirmed today, to discuss “bilateral relations, the diplomatic crisis between the two countries, regional conflicts and cybersecurity,” said spokesman Dmitry Peskov .
In reality the interview, on the sidelines of an institutional visit by Burns to Moscow where he met the head of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and the head of the SVR Sergey Naryshkin, centered on the return of military tensions between Russia and Ukraine, reveals CNN, citing senior sources from the Biden administration.
For months, the United States has condemned the massing of Russian military troops on the Ukrainian eastern border. An alarm that culminated last April with the denunciation, also by Kiev, of more than 100,000 soldiers deployed a few kilometers from the border.
Six months later the danger has not returned, quite the contrary. About a thousand military vehicles stationed around the Russian city of Yelna, 250 kilometers north of the Ukrainian border, unveiled satellite images of the American aerospace company Maxar Technologies a week ago.
Tanks, military convoys, heavy artillery “started arriving in the area in late September,” the company told Reuters. The timing is not accidental: in mid-September, on the Russian western border, Zapad was staged, the traditional joint military exercise between Russia and Belarus which every four years conveys thousands of troops to the “West” (“Zapad”).
This time it had an impressive size: 200,000 soldiers, 760 land vehicles, 80 airplanes and helicopters and about fifteen naval units gathered near Kaliningrad. Some of the Russian troops, however, never returned home. Satellites don’t lie: the 41st Combined Army, usually stationed in Novosibirsk, Siberia, has reversed course and ended up swelling the ranks of Russian troops north of Ukraine. The first tank army of the Russian guard, an elite unit based in Moscow, met the same fate, according to the Washington Post.
The alert is maximum and the White House is following developments closely. Even if Moscow denies – what happens inside the Russian borders “is our business”, the Kremlin comments – Washington fears a new escalation like the one that last spring brought Russia and Ukraine to the brink of open confrontation. Maximum and also caution. “We have seen similar things in the past – says Chief of Staff Mark Milley – we still don’t know what it means, and too soon”. Kiev has also opted for a cautious and fluctuating line. After denying worrying movements of Russian troops, the defense ministry admitted on Tuesday that there are 90,000 Russian troops north of the Ukrainian border.
Soon to say whether Burns’s visit, accompanied by the undersecretaryKaren Donfried to discuss with the Russian government, among other things, an imminent jihadist terrorism alarm, managed to throw water on the fire. It was certainly a very hot summer for the Eastern European front.
Putin has never stopped throwing arrows against Ukraine and its president, Volodimir Zelensky , questioning the very sovereignty of the country. And the Russian government considers Kiev’s request for membership in NATO to be an affront, “a real threat to the Russian Federation”, thundered Putin from the Valdai Club. Tension remains high in the Donbas, where there are continuing violations of the cease-fire. -fire. Among the latest, an attack by the Ukrainian government against a separatist post via a Turkish drone.
To the clashes on the Ukrainian border are added the accusations of the United States for the Russian management of the gas consignment. Now that Nord Stream 2, the Gazprom gas pipeline linking Germany to the Baltic Sea, has been completed and is ready for action, the US government fears that Ukraine is deliberately cut off from Russian gas routes in Europe.
A concern also expressed by the leaders of the gas transport system of Ukraine (Gtsou), numbers in hand: in October the Ukrainian gas transport system to European countries was equal to 2.634 billion cubic meters, with a decrease of 623 million cubic meters compared to the same period in 2020.
