Washington and Moscow's top diplomats meet Friday in Geneva in a last-ditch bid for a solution over Ukraine, with the United States increasingly fearing that Russia will invade despite warnings of severe reprisals.
The talks between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov come just 11 days after their deputies met in Geneva and agreed to preserve dialogue amid Russia's build-up of tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine's border.
They will meet at the lakeside luxury Hotel President Wilson, named for the US leader whose decisions included intervening against the Bolshevik revolution. President Joe Biden bluntly assessed on Wednesday that his counterpart Vladimir Putin is likely to "move in" on Ukraine and warned of a "disaster for Russia".Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that Biden's remarks were destabilising and could "inspire some hotheads in Ukraine with false hopes".
Even while rejecting the core Russian demands, the Biden administration has said it is willing to speak to Moscow about its security concerns. Blinken has called for Putin to choose the "peaceful path" of diplomacy and, hoping to find common ground, said that he will not hand a formal response to Lavrov on Russia's proposals, which were presented last month in unusual detail as draft treaties.
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