(Brussels) The United States and its allies met on Tuesday in Brussels the day after Russian-American talks on the Ukrainian border crisis and on the eve of talks between NATO and Moscow, with Kiev calling for a international summit.
Posted at 11:33 a.m.
Tense discussions were held Monday for nearly eight hours in Geneva, between US Deputy Foreign Minister Wendy Sherman and her Russian counterpart Sergei Riabkov, without allowing a breakthrough.
Westerners accuse Russia of having amassed in recent weeks some 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine to prepare an attack against this country, which Moscow denies.
PHOTO ROMAN KOKSAROV, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Polish, Italian, Canadian and American tanks and other armored vehicles during NATO military maneuvers in Latvia on September 13, 2021.
Russia says this military deployment is a reaction to NATO’s deemed growing and threatening presence in what it sees as its area of influence. Moscow is demanding Western guarantees on a stop to the expansion of this military alliance on its borders, in particular to Ukraine.
A meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, involving senior diplomats from the 30 Alliance member countries and representatives from Moscow, is scheduled for Wednesday in Brussels, the first since July 2019.
“Moment of truth”
It is “a moment of truth” for the Russia-NATO relationship, estimated Alexander Grushko, another representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, who will go to Brussels “with realistic expectations and the hope that there will be a serious, in-depth conversation on key, fundamental issues of European security ”.
Americans and Europeans have so far considered unacceptable Moscow’s demands on a ban on any future NATO enlargement, stressing that it is a matter of sovereignty for the states concerned and promising to maintain a policy open door.
Russia “does not have the right to vote” on the possible accession of Ukraine to NATO, commented the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba.
After Geneva and Brussels, the diplomatic sequence is to continue Thursday in Vienna with a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the platform for East-West dialogue resulting from the Cold War.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for a quadripartite summit with Moscow, Paris and Berlin to “end the conflict” with pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.
The previous so-called “Normandy-format” summit in Paris, in December 2019, had allowed some modest progress. But the peace process then stumbled again, as the war in eastern Ukraine has claimed more than 13,000 lives since 2014, when Russia annexed the peninsula. Ukrainian woman from Crimea.
“Close collaboration”
At NATO Headquarters on Tuesday, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman briefed Alliance countries on talks with her Russian counterpart the day before. She affirmed Washington’s will to work “in close collaboration” with its allies, in the face of Europeans’ concerns of being sidelined in the talks.
Together with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, “we affirmed a unified NATO approach to Russia, achieving the balance between deterrence and dialogue, and underlined our unwavering support for Ukraine” , she added on Twitter.
In a message to Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Eminé Djaparova, she also assured Kiev that the allies “would not take decisions on Ukraine without Ukraine”.
While Washington and Moscow have agreed to continue the dialogue, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov judged the discussions “positive”, while stressing that there was “nothing to say yet on the result”.
Wendy Sherman lamented that Russia has failed to prove that it does not intend to invade Ukraine. The American official put forward tracks for future negotiations, in particular on a “reciprocal” limitation on the deployment of missiles and on military maneuvers in Europe.
The West threatened the Kremlin with “massive” economic and financial sanctions in the event of further aggression against Ukraine.