Russian authorities led by the country’s president try to ensure the security of their land and actively address Western countries to support this intention, offering, from the latest, to make a written agreement ensuring the security guarantees. However, the offers are met with a cold reaction and do not face any steps forward from either the US or other Western countries’ leaders.
The President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, told the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, about the need to immediately begin negotiations to work out clear agreements that would rule out NATO’s expansion eastward. This was reported by the Kremlin on Monday and earlier, on December 10, 2021, the country’s Foreign Ministry urged Western countries to agree upon security guarantees in the written form. As a result, Putin and Johnson agreed to continue the discussion through various channels.
As reported, Putin announced the need to immediately begin negotiations with a view to working out clear international legal agreements that would rule out any further NATO advance to the East and the deployment of weapons that threaten Russia in neighbouring states, primarily in Ukraine. The Russian side promised to present relevant draft documents. It was stated that like other Western leaders, Johnson expressed concern about the alleged large-scale movements of Russian troops near the Ukrainian borders. In turn, Putin stressed that it is NATO that continued active military development of Ukraine, which threatens the security of Russia.
According to the German Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Christopher Burger, Berlin supports holding the Russia-NATO Council meeting to discuss ensuring European security.
“It would be a suitable forum to, perhaps, re-start a conversation not specifically about the situation in Ukraine, but about the fundamental issue that goes beyond this framework, how security can be collectively ensured in Europe,” Burger said.
However, today, on December 15, 2021, the information came out that NATO has rejected Russia’s call for a ban on the deployment of nuclear-capable intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Moreover, Moscow was blamed for violating the INF Treaty that was scrapped by the US, RT reports.
Responding to a Russian suggestion for a moratorium on the deployment of such missiles in Europe, the NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, commented on the idea as “not credible.”
“The proposal from Russia on a moratorium is not credible because we had a ban and they violated that ban,” Stoltenberg claimed, referring to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a landmark 1987 security agreement that the US unilaterally withdrew from in 2019.
He repeated the bloc’s accusations that Moscow had violated the mentioned above treaty by deploying missile systems prohibited in it. Thus, he demanded Russia dismantle them before offering to negotiate a moratorium. Moscow, however, has maintained that the munitions have been created in “full compliance” with the treaty, and could fly up to 480km. In turn, Russia accused the US of violation of the treaty too, pointing to the Mk-41 Aegis Ashore systems deployed in Europe. While Washington portrays them only as a part of its anti-missile defence, Russia has repeatedly pointed out that they can be used to launch cruise missiles currently carried exclusively by US naval vessels.
On December 1, during a press conference following the meeting of the foreign ministers of the alliance countries, Stoltenberg also voiced his position on the Russian role in the world’s geopolitics when answering the question about Ukraine’s possible admission to NATO.
“Russia has no right of veto. Russia has no right to vote. And it has no right to establish a sphere of influence and try to control neighbouring countries. The very formulation of the question already indicates something unacceptable that requires our special attention, namely the existence of a Russian sphere of influence,” Stoltenberg claimed.
The NATO Secretary-General added that in the event of Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine, the alliance countries may apply financial and economic sanctions against it, RT reports.
Such kind of statements among the other things made Putin stress that “every country has the right to choose the most acceptable way to ensure security, but it should be done in such a way as not to violate the interests of other parties and not to undermine the security of other countries, in this case, Russia.”
“The expansion of the NATO bloc to the East, including at the expense of Ukraine, is one of the key issues of ensuring Russia’s security in the medium and even strategic perspective. We talk about this constantly, publicly, and warn our partners that this is unacceptable for us,” Putin emphasized at a press conference following talks with the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
The Russian leader has repeatedly reminded that Western countries did not keep their word to Moscow after the end of the Cold War, recalling that since 1999, “five more waves of NATO expansion have followed,” and 14 new countries, including the republics of the former Soviet Union, have become members of the alliance, “which actually buried hopes for a continent without dividing lines.”
“The promises made in words at that time, that ‘this is not directed against you,’ that ‘the borders of the bloc will not approach you,’ were quickly forgotten. And a precedent has been created,” Putin recalled in the article dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.
In this regard, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, noted that if NATO and the US do not give guarantees not to deploy new weapons in Europe, then Russia is ready to respond to this with its weapons deployment too, RIA Novosti reports.
“That is, it will be a confrontation, it will be the next round, it will be the appearance of such means on our part. Now they are not there, we have a unilateral moratorium, we call on NATO and the US to join this moratorium,” Ryabkov urged.
He clarified that Russia has a concern about the deployment in Europe of weapons prohibited by the INF Treaty. However, unfortunately, Ryabkov stated that the US and the NATO alliance are not responding to Russian proposals.
“Assurances […] that NATO has no intentions of deploying such means in nuclear equipment do not convince us of anything. […] There is no trust in NATO as an alliance in principle,” Ryabkov concluded.
Despite the difficulty of the current situation, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Moscow sees Washington’s willingness to develop a dialogue with Russia even though there are serious contradictions and gaps in their positions on many matters, TASS reports.
“It is necessary to switch the situation of negative confrontation into a dialogue. And it is developing. On December 7, Russian President Vladimir Putin was speaking with US President Joe Biden for more than two hours in the videoconference format. Despite all the serious contradictions and gaps in the approaches, the United States is at least willing to develop such dialogue,” he said.
In the opinion of the Russian diplomat, the current difficulties in relations between the two countries cannot be compared with the Cold War, which was characterized by the confrontation between two socio-economic systems, capitalism and socialism, each of which controlled vast territories.
“Now, the situation is different. There are much more players now. When announcing the new government, Germany’s new Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said that several big powers, rather than only two, will be key players. As a matter of fact, this is a recognition of multilateralism,” Lavrov noted.
He also stated that the important task is “not to set countries against one another in such a competitive environment but to try to regulate this ‘Brownian motion’.”
“This is what the Russian President’s initiative to call a summit of the UN Security Council permanent members is about,” Lavrov underlined.
And just today, on December 15, Boris Johnson revealed that in the event Russia invades Ukraine, London and its NATO allies will apply sanctions to Russia, give aid to Kiev, and create a military build-up of NATO troops along the bloc’s periphery.
“If Russia were so rash and mad as to engage in an invasion of the sovereign territory of Ukraine there would be an extremely tough package of economic sanctions mounted by our allies, mounted by the UK. There would inevitably be the build-up of NATO forces in the periphery regions,” he warned.
The British Prime Minister’s warning comes as tensions about the Ukrainian border are continuingly growing in light of numerous allegations in the Western media that Russia is building up its military presence there, even though Russia has repeatedly advised the West to pay more attention to Kiev’s failure to uphold its commitments under the Minsk agreements, as Kiev is currently being “pumped with” modern weapons and escalates the situation in Donbass “with the silent permission of the West.”
All in all, notwithstanding the lack of productive dialogue between Russia and the Western countries, Moscow anyway decided to insist on the security agreement. For this, Russia has already prepared all the necessary documents it promised. This was stated by Vladimir Putin during a video meeting with Chinese President, Xi Jinping, as reported by Putin’s assistant Yuri Ushakov. According to Ushakov, the proposals were passed to the Assistant Secretary of State Karen Donfried.
“The President informed that just today in our Foreign Ministry, American representatives were given concrete proposals aimed at developing legal guarantees to ensure Russia’s security,” Ushakov specified.
As Ushakov said, the Russian President stressed that the Russian Federation is ready to “immediately begin negotiations on this extremely important issue, which concerns Russia’s security.” In turn, the Chinese President stressed that he fully supports Russia’s initiative to develop appropriate security guarantees for the country.
“The Chinese partner stressed that the negative charge of the American idea is obvious, the aim of this idea is to plant new dividing lines. And Xi Jinping and I stressed that all this is very counterproductive, especially in the current difficult international situation,” Ushakov said.
It is also reported that both parties were united in their assessments about the fact that the Summit for Democracy “from the very beginning was thought of as confrontational, which, in fact, it became.” Besides, both parties expressed their concerns about the emergence of new alliances in the Asia-Pacific region and regard the creation of AUKUS as a threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
“Both from our side and from the Chinese side, a negative assessment was expressed about the creation of new alliances such as the Indo-Pacific Quartet and the American-Anglo-Australian AUKUS. As it was said, the latter alliance generally undermines the regime and the foundations of nuclear non-proliferation and inflates the level of military tension in the region,” Ushakov said.
Ru-Main, 15.12.2021
Source: Sputnik
