Russian President Vladimir Putin accused NATO of ignoring Russian “red lines” in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, a habit that he blamed for raising the risk of a new crisis “tomorrow.”
“Indeed, we constantly express our concerns about these matters and talk about red lines,” Putin said Thursday, according to Kremlin transcript. “Our partners are peculiar in the sense that they have a very, how to put it mildly, superficial approach to our warnings about red lines.”
Putin addressed his foreign policy team against a backdrop of a humanitarian crisis in Belarus, where dictator Alexander Lukashenko has been accused of bringing thousands of migrants from the Middle East and driving them across the border in a bid to create a migration crisis for NATO members. That controversy has exacerbated unease about a potential eruption of violence between Russia and neighboring Ukraine, which has been locked in a war with Russia since 2014.
“It is doing a terrible injustice to these people that it is victimizing by making them pawns in the efforts that the Belarusian regime is engaged in to be disruptive,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday, in response to reports that at least some migrants have returned to Iraq as Belarusian authorities clear the camps on their border with Poland. “We’ve been in regular contact with all of our EU partners. We will remain very focused on this and we’ll see exactly what this actually means and what the practical effect of the clearing of the camps is.”
BLINKEN WARNS PUTIN NOT TO ATTACK UKRAINE AS RUSSIA SENDS BOMBERS AMID BELARUS BORDER CRISIS
Putin, who has supported Lukashenko in the face of domestic political protests while pressing the Belarusian strongman to agree to integration with Russia, claimed that it was Western countries rather than Belarusian officials manipulating the migrants’ suffering.
“It is also impossible to ignore that Western countries are using the migration crisis on Belarus-Poland border as a new reason for tension in a region close to us, for putting pressure on Minsk, while at the same time forgetting their own humanitarian commitments,” he said. “The first thing that comes to mind is those poor children — there are small children there.”
That dispute has been overlaid with the adjacent conflict in Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2014 to annex Crimea and gain control of other regions in eastern Ukraine.
“Our Western partners are exacerbating the situation by supplying Kyiv with modern lethal weapons, conducting provocative military exercises in the Black Sea and other regions close to our borders,” Putin complained. “With regard to the Black Sea, this even goes beyond certain limits since strategic bombers, which carry very serious weapons, fly at a distance of only 20 km from our state border.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who attended the meeting, accused Ukraine of sabotaging the Normandy Format peace process brokered under the oversight of France and Germany — one that Russia has participated in while denying involvement in the Ukraine conflict.
“We will have a meeting exclusively when they report to us that Kyiv will implement everything that is contained in the previous decisions,” he said.
Lavrov claims that his reason for releasing confidential correspondence is because the Russian position has been “perverted”, so he is seeking to appeal to the public. But of course, the release of these documents only shows just how unreasonable Russia’s position actually is.
— Sergey Radchenko (@DrRadchenko) November 17, 2021
Lavrov justified that position by leaking private correspondence with French and German officials that revealed a dispute about whether to hold another meeting of the Normandy Format, although some analysts argued that the leaked messages expose Russia’s attempt to use the process to win a victory over Ukraine.
“[The letters] concern the prospect of having a Normandy meeting on the conflict in Ukraine,” Dr. Sergey Radchenko, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, wrote on Twitter. “Lavrov refused to participate after Germany and France refused to endorse his proposed final document, which Ukraine would have to sign, and which contains questionable propositions.”
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Putin maintained that Russia does not want any trouble. “Mr. Lavrov, it is imperative to push for serious long-term guarantees that ensure Russia’s security in this area, because Russia cannot constantly be thinking about what could happen there tomorrow,” he said.
