More dialogue to avoid a collision with dramatic consequences for Europe. The Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, have agreed this Friday at a meeting in Geneva to continue diplomatic talks on the crisis with Ukraine and the expansion of NATO. At a maximum point of tension due to the concentration of Russian troops along the Ukrainian borders and when diplomatic efforts follow one another, Blinken has promised to send in writing his “ideas” and proposals to Moscow on his demands, which demand that the Atlantic Alliance do not expand into Russia and withdraw from what you consider to be your sphere of influence. After this, new talks are planned to de-escalate the major crisis, which has raised the alert in Kiev, NATO and the EU due to fears that Russia will initiate a new military aggression against Ukraine.
The Geneva talks, at the end of a hyperactive round of diplomacy on several fronts to defuse tension, have not changed course. However, they could buy time that is very valuable. While open to more dialogue, Russia, which has already concentrated some 106,000 soldiers near the Ukrainian borders, continues to mobilize troops. The Kremlin has only two options, Blinken warned: “Choose diplomacy for European security or a conflict with enormous consequences.”
Following a 90-minute meeting at a hotel in the Swiss city on Lake Geneva, Lavrov dismissed Western “hysteria” about Ukraine and reiterated that Moscow had no plans to attack the neighboring country. The heads of diplomacy in Moscow and Washington, who held separate press conferences, also left the door open for another conversation between the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the American, Joe Biden.
Russia accuses NATO of threatening its security and has repeatedly demanded a written reply to the draft treaty that it sent in December – when the situation was beginning to heat up – to the Alliance and the United States, whom it considers its main interlocutor, in which It demands that the Alliance renounce new members among the countries of the former USSR (such as Georgia and Ukraine, which received the proposal for accession in 2008, a membership, however, that seems distant due to lack of reforms). It also demands that NATO and Washington halt all military activity in Eastern Europe (where it has no bases but does deploy multi-national battalions on rotation in Poland and the Baltic states) and withdraw all their forces from Bulgaria, Romania and other former communist countries that joined to the Alliance after 1997. If the West does not accept its demands, Putin has warned, Russia will take unspecified “military-technical” measures to ensure its security.
NATO has already made it clear that it will not accept Russia’s veto of membership of a sovereign state. And this Friday, Blinken stressed that he will not negotiate with Moscow the “open door” policy of the Atlantic Alliance (of which Spain is a member) and that there will also be no talks “about Ukraine without Ukraine”, just as NATO will not be discussed. without the Alliance, or the European Union without the EU. “If Russia wants to start convincing the world that it has no aggressive intentions against Ukraine, de-escalation would be a very good starting point,” Blinken said.
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On the final leg of a hurried whirlwind trip to Europe, in which he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, and with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the foreign ministers of Germany, the United Kingdom and France In Berlin, the US Secretary of State insisted that if Russia invades the neighboring country again it will face “a swift, severe, united response and massive consequences.”
The US and the EU already imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014, when the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was annexed with a referendum considered illegal by the international community and held with a military presence on the ground. Now, the United States has promised to impose substantial sanctions on Moscow (some that could even paralyze its banking system) if the Kremlin – which supports militarily and politically the pro-Russian separatists who have been fighting for eight years with the Ukrainian army in Donbas – initiates a new military aggression. However, no agreement has been reached on a common sanctions package against Moscow and the issue is challenging Washington.
Before Blinken’s appearance, Lavrov said he hoped “emotions” about Ukraine would calm down, saying Russia did not pose a threat to the former Soviet republic. “I can’t say yet whether or not we are on the right track. We will understand this when we get the US response, on paper, on all the points of our proposals,” said the Russian minister, who seemed to take the US openness to put its proposals in writing as a small victory and pointed out that this reply could arrive next week. next. Blinken commented that after the meeting with Lavrov – “talks, not negotiations”, he specified – he will meet with President Biden, the UN Security Council and allies, before presenting his “concerns and ideas” to Russia.
The Russian Army continues to mobilize troops near the borders with Ukraine with soldiers arriving from different parts of the country, according to satellite images and also numerous videos broadcast on social networks. A deployment to which are added numerous maneuvers on its eastern flanks, in Belarus (also along the border with Ukraine), in the Caucasus and even naval, in the Black Sea but also in the Mediterranean in another display of military muscle. Moscow claims that it can mobilize its army as it wishes within its borders.
The tension does not drop. Sources from the Ukrainian espionage services estimate that Moscow has already concentrated some 106,000 soldiers with heavy and sophisticated weapons along its borders; also to tactical groups. In addition, it has also assembled troops in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Meanwhile, the United States has authorized Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to send Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Ukrainian Army, which has already received anti-tank missiles from the UK this month and has been asking for more defense support and additional weapons for months. .
Diplomatic efforts continue. This Friday, Putin and his Finnish counterpart, Sauli Niinistö, spoke by phone about the situation. “Moscow,” Putin told him, according to the Kremlin transcript, “waits waiting for the written, concrete and detailed response promised by the negotiating partners to the preliminary documents on the provision of legal guarantees for Russia’s security.” Niinistö also spoke this week with Biden.
The scenarios for a Russian intervention are diverse. This Friday, one of the Ukrainian espionage services revealed that it has information that Russia is sending mercenaries, military equipment and tons of fuel to the Donestsk and Lugansk regions. Last week, US intelligence claimed it has evidence that Moscow may be preparing a false flag operation in Donbas, where the long conflict has already claimed 14,000 lives, in the form of “provocations” to spark a very tense situation and thus have an excuse to intervene openly in the breakaway regions, where it has handed over around a million Russian passports.
Hybrid warfare is part of the Kremlin’s playbook. And within it, the use of soldiers without a flag (such as the so-called “green men” who entered Crimea in 2014) and mercenaries, which it has already used in the war in Donbas, in Syria and in Libya as a force ‘not official’ acting in the interests of the Kremlin. On Wednesday, President Biden stated that he believes Putin will again intervene militarily in Ukraine, although his words that a “minor incursion” (such as an operation to formally annex Donbas) would have less repercussions against Moscow than an invasion. on a large scale caused resentment and alarm in Kiev and among some NATO allies. “We must remember that Russian aggression is not a mere Ukraine-Russia problem,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a note from his department on Friday. “It is a problem of the entire European and Euro-Atlantic security system. If the Kremlin plot for Ukraine is allowed to succeed, its appetite will grow even more and the West is likely to face even more problems with Russia.”
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