Biden and Putin to Talk Tough On Ukraine | Quick Take | GZERO Media

A new war isn’t imminent between Russia and Ukraine, but there’s conflict on the horizon. Subscribe to GZERO on YouTube: http://bit.ly/2TxCVnY Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: I want to talk about Russia. And you will, of course, be hearing all of the stories about Russia gearing up for a war with Ukraine, taking more territory. The Americans saying don't do it, but not setting up any clear red lines. What's actually going on here? Well, it's worth going back to the last time that Biden and Putin met with each other. That was in Geneva back in mid-June. And you'll remember that Biden snapped at the end of the meeting and the press conference. He was asked by someone, "How come you trust Russia, you trust Putin?" And he said, "I don't trust Putin. We'll see what happens over the coming months." Now at that point, Ukraine was not the big topic that was being discussed. This was on the back of the attacks, the cyberattacks against Colonial Pipeline in the United States, clearly coming from criminal gangs in Russia, operating with the full knowledge of the Kremlin. And the big takeaway from the meeting, from the summit, from Biden was telling Putin, "look, you need to put a stop to this because if you don't, they're going to be direct consequences." A stop to what? A stop specifically to cyberattacks emanating from Russia, even if not directly from the Kremlin against critical infrastructure in the United States. Not espionage, which the United States does as well, of course. Not attacks, malware attacks against noncritical infrastructure, which is an annoyance, which the American would like to put an end to. But which Biden was not saying was a red line, but specifically critical infrastructure. And indeed, it's been several months now, almost six months and there has been movement. There has been some progress. It's pretty clear that the Kremlin gave some form of instruction to these organizations. Let's hold off. Let's cool it on those sorts of attacks. And we indeed haven't seen them at the same degree at the same level that we did back in June. But now we're talking about something very different, which is Ukraine. And indeed the Russians have significantly expanded both their exercises as well as their troops in place across the Ukrainian border. And they've also given some notice to the United States directly and to NATO more broadly that the present status quo is unacceptable. They want some sort of an agreement between NATO and the Russians on what is and is not acceptable behavior. And indeed, tomorrow Biden and Putin are going to be meeting directly to talk about this. What's going to happen? Are we likely to see war between Russia and Ukraine breaking out? I think no, but I also think there's a lot of danger short of that. There are a lot of other hybrid activities that Russians could indeed take. So why are the Russians doing this? I think there are two reasons. The first is because indeed, even though Ukraine is not a member of NATO and will not become a member of NATO because the United States is unprepared and other NATO countries in Europe are unprepared to offer defense assurances, that they would protect Ukraine if their territorial integrity was breached indeed, as it already has been in 2014. But also there has been an increase of NATO support for Ukraine in recent months. We've seen more NATO training of Ukrainian troops on the ground. We've seen more extended exercises of NATO, as well as overflight, right up to the Ukrainian border, all sorts of ships going through the Black Sea. Sign up for GZERO’s free newsletter on global politics, Signal: http://bit.ly/gzerosignal Subscribe to the GZERO podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Like GZERO on Facebook:   / gzeromedia   Follow GZERO on Twitter:   / gzeromedia   Follow GZERO on LinkedIn:   / 18385722   GZERO Media is a multimedia publisher providing news, insights and commentary on the events shaping our world. Our properties include GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, our newsletter Signal, Puppet Regime, the GZERO World Podcast, In 60 Seconds and GZEROMedia.com #QuickTake #BidenPutin #Ukraine