United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns has met his Russian counterpart Sergey Naryshkin who is the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service in Ankara.
According to the TASS news agency, the spokesman of the Kremlin Dmitry Peskov has said that the negotiation had taken place after the initiative from the American side.
This was the first high-level US-Russian face-to-face contact since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. According to media reports the two discussed the consequences of the use of nukes and US prisoners in Russian jails.
According to a statement from a White House official, both spy chiefs discussed the consequences of using nuclear weapons.
US President Joe Biden also met with their Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and a discussion on the reduction of the threat of nuclear war in Ukraine was discussed between them.
According to Reuters, a US official has said that Burns was not conducting negotiations of any kind but he was only discussing the settlement of the Ukraine war. He also said that the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons along with risks of escalation to strategic stability were conveyed by the US spy chief.
Burns has also remained the US ambassador to Russia and Biden had sent him to Moscow in 2021 to caution President Putin over the troop build-up around Ukraine.
