Biden’s bellicose rhetoric against Russia risks inflaming Ukraine tensions: Analyst

The US President Joe Biden administration’s “bellicose” rhetoric against Russia in relation to Ukraine risks inflaming tensions between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-speaking people in the country’s east, where an armed conflict is ongoing, an American journalist tells Press TV.

American journalist Max Parry told Press TV on Wednesday that Biden “sets an altogether different tone from his predecessor and risks escalating an already precarious crisis in eastern Ukraine.”

He said Biden was “making implicit threats against Russia and pouring fuel on an already fiery situation in the Ukraine crisis.”

Parry said former US president Donald Trump had “at least rhetorically embraced the idea of détente with Moscow at times, which was considered heresy among the political establishment.”

“Within just a few months into the new administration, however,” he said, “Biden already struck a different tone in his previous remarks, calling President Putin ‘a killer.’”

Relations between the White House and the Kremlin hit a new low last month after Biden said in an interview that he believed Putin was a “killer” and that the Russian president would have to “pay a price” for interference in the 2020 US presidential election. Russia has denied that it interfered in the election.

While the Russian president himself took Biden’s description lightly, the Russian government recalled the ambassador to the US for consultations.

Parry described Biden’s assertion “as extremely irresponsible, which undermines the possibility of successful diplomacy between what are two nuclear-armed nations in the US and Russia.”

On Tuesday, Biden held a phone conversation with Putin, telling the Russian president that Washington would extend “unwavering” support for Ukraine.

The phone call, the second between the two presidents since Biden took office in January, came as tensions are escalating in and over the Russian-speaking Donbass region of Ukraine, where Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian forces have been fighting since 2014.

Ukraine says Russia is amassing thousands of military personnel on its northern and eastern borders as well as on the Crimean Peninsula.

Washington, meanwhile, has begun sending warships and fighter jets to Ukraine near the Russian border to support Kiev in the face of what it calls Russian threats.

The US and its Western allies accuse Moscow of stirring tensions through the military build-up along its border with Ukraine. Russia, however, says it is taking defensive measures on its own territory in the face of increased NATO activity in Ukraine.

Parry stressed that the Russian military buildup along the border with Ukraine “is actually in response to hostilities by Kiev and NATO.”

He said that the Ukrainian government has been “committing actual aggression for seven years now with the routine bombing of its own people in the Donbass.”

In 2014, the then-Ukrainian territory of Crimea also voted in a referendum to fall under Russian sovereignty.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a decree last month to “recover” Crimea from Russia.

Parry said the decree “was almost certainly given the go-ahead by the new US administration, which clearly seeks to further instigate the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, using Kiev as a proxy for US imperialism.”

“Biden’s cabinet is filled with Russophobic warmongers,” he added, naming “Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who took out an op-ed praising Trump’s decision to send arms to Kiev.”

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