Joe Biden reasserts warning as Putin signals satisfaction with call

Bloomberg

President Joe Biden repeated his warning to Moscow to de-escalate the month-long standoff over Ukraine, a day after he and Vladimir Putin discussed the issue during a call the Russian leader expressed his satisfaction with.
“I made it clear to President Putin that if he makes any more moves, goes into Ukraine, we will have severe sanctions,” Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware. “We’ll increase our presence in Europe with our Nato allies and it will just be a heavy price to pay for him.”
Ahead of Biden’s remarks, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said Putin was pleased with the conversation between the two leaders, setting the stage for three sets of negotiations on European security next month.
“This is what we are working for and for this our presidents reached an agreement, which is why we are happy and satisfied,” Ushakov told reporters following the phone call. “Today’s conversation was good, constructive, frank, and it seems to me that it provides not a bad, even in fact a good, basis for the start of negotiations.”
Biden, too, said he expects the talks to “make progress.”
The softer rhetoric, coupled with the prospect of further talks next month, represents a dialing down of regional stresses that worsened when Russia began massing troops along the border with Ukraine earlier this year. Both sides “have partially drawn a line under further escalation of tensions,” the Tass news agency cited Leonid Slutsky, head of the State Duma’s committee on foreign affairs, as saying. Biden was expected to speak by phone with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Sunday to reaffirm
US support for his nation’s sovereignty and territorial
integrity.