US president Joe Biden will be “messaging” Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin when he speaks in Poland on Tuesday, the United States said.
Agence France-Presse reports that Mr Biden is to give the speech in Warsaw on the same day Mr Putin is set to give his own speech in Moscow, three days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s February 24th invasion of Ukraine.
Mr Biden will arrive in Warsaw on Tuesday, and on Wednesday he will meet leaders of the Bucharest Nine, a group of Nato members in eastern Europe. In addition, the White House said, he would speak by phone next week with the leaders of Britain, France and Italy.
The US president’s main public event will be the speech delivered on Tuesday from Warsaw’s Royal Castle on “how the United States has rallied the world to support the people of Ukraine as they defend their freedom and democracy”, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday.
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“President Biden will make it clear that the United States will continue to stand with Ukraine ... for as long as it takes. ... And I would suspect that you’ll hear him messaging Mr Putin as well, as well as the Russian people.” Mr Kirby said.
Elsewhere, the White House said on Friday the Russian mercenary company Wagner Group has suffered more than 30,000 casualties since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, with about 9,000 of those fighters killed in action.
The United States estimates that 90 per cent of Wagner group soldiers killed in Ukraine since December were convicts, Mr Kirby told reporters at a regular briefing.
Half of the overall deaths occurred since mid-December, as fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut intensified, an NSC spokesperson said, citing newly downgraded intelligence.
Mr Kirby said mercenary group had made incremental gains in Bakhmut in and around Bakhmut over the last few days, but those had taken many months to achieve and came at a “devastating cost that is not sustainable”.
“It is possible that they may end up being successful in Bakhmut, but it will prove of no real worth to them because it is of no real strategic value,” he said, adding that Ukrainian forces would maintain strong defensive lines across the Donbas region.
Mr Kirby said Wagner continued to rely heavily on convicts, who were sent to war with no training or equipment, despite recent comments from group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin that he had stopped recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has demanded that western allies adopt a united front to expedite arms deliveries to his country, warning “it is speed on which life depends”.
Speaking by video link at the opening of the three-day Munich Security Conference, he likened Ukraine to a biblical David battling a Russian Goliath who “won’t be defeated by the power of conversation but the power of actions, by the courage of the sling”.
“Courage is what we have but the sling should get stronger,” he said. – Agencies