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| - US President Joe Biden on Tuesday told his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to lower tensions on the Ukrainian border and suggested they hold their first summit. The phone call took place as relations between Moscow and Washington, as well as European capitals, come under rapidly growing strain from Russia's huge military build-up next to Ukraine. According to the White House, Russia now has the largest military deployment in the area since invading part of Ukraine in 2014, seizing the Crimea region and allegedly giving military help to pro-Moscow insurgents who wrested a swath of eastern Ukraine from central government control. In a phone call with Putin, Biden "voiced our concerns over the sudden Russian military build-up in occupied Crimea and on Ukraine's borders, and called on Russia to de-escalate tensions," a White House statement said. In contrast to former president Donald Trump's reluctance to criticize Putin, Biden came into office in January openly attacking what he says is the Kremlin's meddling in US elections, mounting of a huge cyber attack last year, and the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Biden said in a March interview that he agreed Putin is a "killer." The White House has promised retaliatory actions but has yet to make public any details. In a surprise move Tuesday, Biden also used the call to suggest a summit with Putin somewhere other than in the United States or Russia. "President Biden reaffirmed his goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia consistent with US interests, and proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia," the White House statement said. Putin similarly held a summit in Finland in 2018 with Trump, who caused a furor at home by appearing to ignore his own intelligence community's assessment and to accept the Russian leader's denials of election meddling. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the summit was being proposed for "the coming months," which would mean "this summer." However, she expressed US skepticism over how much could be achieved in relations with Putin's Russia. "What we're working toward is predictable and stable. We're not looking for an establishment of trust as much as a predictability and stability," she told reporters. Moscow earlier Tuesday responded to criticism of its troop deployments by saying they were "training exercises" and said Russia felt threatened by the western NATO alliance. In its readout of the Biden-Putin call, the Kremlin said "both sides expressed their readiness to continue dialogue on the most important areas of ensuring global security." It also said that Biden proposed a summit "in the near future" but did not say whether the idea had been accepted. Amid fears in Ukraine that Russia could launch a large-scale assault, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba met in Brussels with top officials of NATO nations including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who voiced his strong support for Kiev. burs-sms/bfm
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