New details have emerged of the extraordinary 90-minute phone call between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin on Saturday night, during which the US president warned his Russian counterpart that Moscow could face "serious repercussions" unless it halted military operations in Ukraine.
The call, made at Mr Obama’s initiation and carried out from the phone at his desk in the Oval office, was described by one US government official as “candid and direct”.
The president “told Mr Putin that it was imperative to find a different path, to roll back this invasion and undo this act of invasion,” secretary of state John Kerry said yesterday.
A former diplomatic official said a Russia expert at the state department's office of language services would probably have been patched in to the call remotely, to translate each of Mr Putin's statements to Mr Obama after they were made. Simultaneous translation is often avoided during high-stakes calls due to the need for precision with language – explaining the extraordinary length of the conversation, thought to be by far the longest between the two men.
Read-outs from the call distributed by the White House and the Kremlin demonstrated how far apart the two leaders remained on key issues.
Mr Obama told Mr Putin that his actions were a “clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, which is a breach of international law”, according to the US.
The Kremlin statement said Mr Putin told Mr Obama, bluntly, that the US-backed interim Ukraine administration was threatening “the lives and health of Russian citizens and the many compatriots” in Crimea.
The call was one of the most excruciating ways imaginable for Mr Obama to spend a Saturday afternoon, according to one of his former national security aides.
If forced to rank the “most painful way to spend 90 minutes”, Tommy Vietor said on Twitter, Mr Obama would place a telephone call with Mr Putin at number one, followed by a visit to the dentist’s – with no anaesthesia.
Guardian