Ukraine crisis: Biden warns Americans to leave now as 'things could go crazy quickly'
US President Joe Biden has repeated his warning that any Americans still in Ukraine should leave as soon as possible.
“It’s not like we’re dealing with a terrorist organisation. We’re dealing with one of the largest armies in the world. It’s a very different situation and things could go crazy quickly,” he said in an interview with NBC News broadcast on Thursday.
Asked whether there was any scenario that would prompt him to send US troops to Ukraine to rescue Americans, the president said: “There’s not. That’s a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another.”
"We’re in a very different world than we’ve ever been," he added.
He argued that if Putin is “foolish enough to go in, he’s smart enough not to, in fact, do anything that would negatively impact on American citizens.”
Asked whether he’s ever said that to Putin, Biden said he had. “I didn’t have to tell him that. I’ve spoken about that. He knows that,” the US president said.
The State Department for weeks has advised Americans in Ukraine to leave the country.
The US president's comments came after a day of diplomatic efforts in Europe to ease tensions over Ukraine -- where Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops near its border -- with little signs of making headway.
Foreign policy advisers from Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine, who met in Paris last month, held another round of talks in Berlin. They reported no progress on the implementation of a 2015 peace agreement that helped end full-scale hostilities between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
In Moscow, the UK's top diplomat openly clashed with her Russian counterpart after talks that Sergei Lavrov described as "quarrelsome".
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss
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