SULAIMANI — Russia and the United States gave no sign that they had narrowed their differences on Ukraine and wider European security in talks in Geneva on Monday, as Moscow repeated demands that Washington says it cannot accept.
Russia has massed troops near Ukraine’s border while demanding that the U.S.-led NATO alliance rule out admitting the former Soviet state or expanding further into what Moscow sees as its back yard.
“Unfortunately we have a great disparity in our principled approaches to this. The U.S. and Russia in some ways have opposite views on what needs to be done,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters, according to Reuters.
Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said: “We were firm … in pushing back on security proposals that are simply non-starters to the United States.”
Washington and Kyiv say the 100,000 Russian troops moved to striking distance could be preparing a new invasion, eight years after Russia seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.
Russia denies any such plans and says it is responding to what it calls aggressive behaviour from NATO and Ukraine, which has tilted toward the West and aspires to join the alliance.
Ryabkov repeated a set of sweeping demands including a ban on further NATO expansion and an end to the alliance’s activity in the central and eastern European countries that joined it after 1997.
He said it was absolutely “mandatory” for Russia to ensure that Ukraine never became a NATO member.
Sherman said: “We will not allow anyone to slam closed NATO’s open-door policy, which has always been central to the NATO alliance.
“We will not forego bilateral cooperation with sovereign states that wish to work with the United States, and we will not make decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine, about Europe without Europe, or about NATO without NATO.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who will meet the Russian team on Wednesday in Brussels, said Russia and the West may not resolve all issues this week but could find a pathway to avoid conflict.
“What we are hoping for is that we can agree on a way forward, that we can agree on a series of meetings, that we can agree on a process,” Stoltenberg said.
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanishyna, appearing alongside him, said Russia’s demands “cannot be considered as a negotiating position”.
She told reporters the “aggressor is not in a position to put conditions” while Russian tanks remained near the Ukrainian border.
The United States and allies have said they are prepared to discuss the possibility of each side restricting military exercises and missile deployments in the region.
Both sides will put proposals on the table and then see if there are grounds for moving forward, Blinken said on Sunday.
If diplomacy fails, and Moscow acts against Ukraine, the United States has been discussing with allies and partners in Europe and Asia a range of trade restrictions against Moscow, a source familiar with the plan said.
One restriction could target critical Russian industrial sectors, including defense and civil aviation, and would hit Russia’s high-tech ambitions, such as in artificial intelligence or quantum computing, or even consumer electronics.
(Esta Media Network/Reuters)
*This story was updated at 09:31 p.m. EBL time
