Sky News :
A proposed meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin is “certainly is not in the plans” anymore, the White House’s spokesperson has said.
Jen Psaki added that tensions over the planned invasion of Ukraine would have to ease before such a meeting took place.
It came at the end of a day when Mr Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine’s disputed regions drew condemnation across the globe.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday that he had canceled a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov scheduled for Thursday.
The White House said on Sunday that Biden had agreed “in principle” to French-brokered summit talks with Putin after the meeting between the two countries’ top diplomats. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded on Monday that the Kremlin does not rule out the possibility of contacts between the two presidents, but it is premature to talk about a Putin-Biden summit at the moment. Since December, the Russian and U.S. presidents have held three sets of talks on Ukraine, including a video conference on December 7 and two phone calls in late December and earlier this month. The two leaders held their only face-to-face summit in June last year.
China on Tuesday called on all parties to exercise restraint and resolve differences through dialogue and negotiation to ease the tensions in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Russian troops sent into Luhansk and Donetsk “are not peacekeepers at all”.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK was sanctioning five Russian banks and three oligarchs, freezing their UK assets and banning travel to Britain.
