The White House
For Immediate Release
January 10, 2022
2:13 P.M. EST
MS. PSAKI: Well, the President meets, as you know, regularly with his national security team — members of his national security team, as he did this morning. I don’t mean a formal NSC meeting; I mean the regular PDB meeting where he is — receives regular updates.
As you know, those talks just ended late this morning. I think you probably have all seen Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman did a briefing following the conclusion of those as well.
I would just reiterate some of the points that she made, of course: that these talks were frank, that — and forthright, and there was a discussion from the United — from the U.S. side of what our expectations are, and a reiteration of what you’ve heard the President say and what you’ve heard many officials from the United States say, which is that there are two paths for Russia to take at this point — for President Putin to take.
He can take the path to diplomacy — there’s two more rounds of talks this week; we’ve seen them as a package of three, which I think they also reiterated from their side — or there’s a path of escalation. We are certainly hopeful that the path of diplomacy is the path that they will take.
There are, of course, a range of topics discussed during that meeting, including a reiteration of what is at stake should they decide to move forward and invade Ukraine.
In terms of an assessment of where they stand, I would really leave that to the Russians to articulate. We can’t give an assessment of that from here, and Deputy Secretary Sherman did not as well.
Q And what would it look like for the Russians to choose the diplomatic path? Is that just — does that mean they have to withdraw some of their forward-deployed forces on the border with Ukraine in order to have that more sustained engagement, or it just not invading further would keep the diplomatic pathway — conversation alive?
MS. PSAKI: Well, Zeke, there are 100,000 troops at the border now. Obviously, returning those troops to the barracks — returning troops to the barracks, conveying to us their intention of doing that is certainly — would be easy ways to show de-escalation.
As I noted a little bit earlier, we see this as a path — as a — as a set of three rounds of conversations that will occur this week.
As you’ve heard many of our national security officials state, but I will reiterate from here: No talks without — about Europe without Europe, no talks without — about Ukraine without Ukraine. And that is certainly our mentality.
So, we are moving forward with the other two rounds of talks and discussions here. But, absolutely, the aggressive action, the bellicose rhetoric came from the Russians, so they have the ability and the power to de-escalate.