GENEVA (AFP, BLOOMBERG, REUTERS) - US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday (Jan 21) that he asked Russia to prove its intentions by pulling back troops deployed on Ukraine’s borders.
“We have heard Russian officials say that they have no intention of invading Ukraine. In fact, Mr Lavrov repeated that to me today,” Mr Blinken told reporters after talks with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva.
“If Russia wants to begin to convince the world that it has no aggressive intent toward Ukraine, a very good place to start would be by de-escalating, by bringing back – removing – those forces on Ukraine’s border,” he said.
The top United States and Russian diplomats emerged from a 90-minute meeting with little clear progress made but an agreement to keep talking.
Mr Blinken said the US will soon send written responses to Russia addressing its concerns, while Mr Lavrov dismissed Western “hysteria” over Ukraine and repeated that Moscow has no plans to attack its neighbour.
The two sides agreed that negotiations should take place in a less emotional atmosphere, though Mr Lavrov said he can’t say now whether talks are on the right path or not.
The meeting appeared to buy some time for both sides to pursue diplomacy amid increasingly urgent warnings by US President Joe Biden that Russia could be planning an imminent intervention in Ukraine after having massed around 100,000 troops near its border.
But the situation remains extremely tense and it’s unclear what the US could offer Russia that would address its demands about the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato).
“What was agreed today which was that we will share with Russia a response to the concerns it’s raised, our own concerns, and put some ideas on the table for consideration,” Mr Blinken said. “And then we plan to meet again after Russia has had an opportunity to look at that paper.”
The Blinken-Lavrov meeting comes after Mr Biden and his aides spent much of Thursday seeking to clarify remarks the president made a day earlier suggesting the US and Europe were divided over how to respond to a “minor incursion” into Ukraine.
As US officials worked to reassure European allies on their resolve, Mr Biden laid out his clearest line yet on what action would trigger serious punishment.
“If any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” he said.
The US and Europe are warning that further aggressive Russian moves that could start potentially the worst conflict in Europe in decades.
While Russia denies it plans an invasion, the US and its European allies say President Vladimir Putin’s intentions remain unclear.
And Russian officials, who deny plans to invade, say the West is the aggressor.
“What Nato is now doing toward Ukraine clearly shows that Nato sees Ukraine as part of its sphere of influence,” Mr Lavrov said.
Russia is demanding binding security guarantees that would bar Ukraine from ever joining the Nato and require the alliance to roll back its forces to positions they held in 1997, before central and eastern European nations joined Nato.
The US and its Nato allies have rejected those demands.
The meeting capped days of intense diplomacy by Mr Blinken, who visited his Ukrainian counterpart in Kiev and held talks in Berlin with UK, German and French allies before traveling to Geneva.
Meanwhile, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, said he plans consultations next week with the leaders of party factions in the State Duma on a draft appeal for Putin to recognize areas of eastern Ukraine seized by Kremlin-backed separatists in 2014 as independent states.
The appeal submitted by Communist Party lawmakers says recognition is “morally justified” and would enable Russia to give security guarantees to the separatist-held territories.
But Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov yesterday reacted coolly to the Russian parliament initiative, saying it was important to avoid steps that could increase tensions.
