@time

In early December, as over 100,000 Russian troops stood at the border with Ukraine, President Joe Biden held a call with Vladimir Putin to defuse the tensions, writes Simon Shuster. It was a breakthrough for Putin to get a U.S. President to engage with him on the future of the NATO alliance, which Putin has long described as the main threat to Russian security. The response from Russian diplomats smacked of an old negotiating tactic: start high. They demanded a written guarantee from the U.S. that Ukraine would never join NATO. They also told the U.S. to withdraw its military forces from Eastern Europe, retreating to positions they held before Putin took power. As the lead Russian envoy put it ahead of talks in January, “NATO needs to pack up its stuff and get back to where it was in 1997.” Rather than defusing the standoff, Biden’s overture allowed Russia to air a long list of grievances against the West, unleashing what one Kremlin insider in Moscow described to me as “an enormous pile of pent-up tensions.” Read more at the link in our bio. Pictured here: A member of the Ukrainian army’s 25th Airborne Brigade at the front line in Avdiivka on Dec. 2. Photograph by Brendan Hoffman—The New York Times/REDUX (@hoffmanbrendan)

February 03, 2022