Russian President Vladimir Putin complained that Western officials “ignored” his core demands for how to avert a military crisis in Europe as the trans-Atlantic alliance watches for signs of whether Russia will launch a major assault against Ukraine.
“The fundamental Russian concerns were ignored,” Putin said Tuesday, following a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Putin, in his first public remarks on the crisis, put a spotlight on the priorities outlined in the “draft treaty” that Russian officials unveiled prior to Christmas — the ban on NATO accepting any new members and the withdrawal of U.S. and Western European military forces from the territory of NATO’s Eastern European allies. Those demands struck many Western officials as an apparent “pretext for war,” a misgiving stoked by Russian references to the potential for conflict and the mobilization of Russian troops around Ukraine.
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“We continue to hear those assurances that Russia is not planning to invade, but certainly every action we see says otherwise,” a senior State Department official told reporters Tuesday following a conversation between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“If President Putin does not intend war or regime change,” the official said, paraphrasing Blinken’s remarks to Lavrov, “then this is the time to pull back troops and heavy weaponry and engage in a serious discussion in these various formats that can advance collective European security.”
U.S. and European allies have dismissed Russia’s demands regarding NATO, on the grounds that the Kremlin is trying to assert a veto over defensive arrangements between sovereign states. Lavrov insisted that Russian military deployments near Ukraine are not a threat to anyone, although they have reached a scale that Western national security strategists assess that Putin could conduct several kinds of offensives against Ukraine.
“Our maps of the Russian force lay down around Ukraine, essentially, show that the country is surrounded by three sides, and in addition to the ground force presence in Belarus as well as the Russian-Ukrainian border,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s International Security Program Director Seth Jones said Monday. “We still see probably at least six types of military options that the Russians could take.”
Those options range from “essentially a stand down but continuing to operate militarily,” to an asset designed to “a seizure of all of Ukraine” through an assault from Russia and Belarus, and perhaps even from the Black Sea. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, so the trans-Atlantic allies will not send troops to fight alongside them, but U.S. and European powers have tried to deter a potential Russian assault with threats of “severe” economic sanctions and the provision of new weaponry to improve the Ukrainian military.
“The Ukrainians have been able to fight effectively in a range of areas over the last couple of years,” said Jones. “So if the Russians move in, in no way, shape, or form would I personally argue that anything would be easy, particularly if there were weapons systems provided or other types of cyber defense systems, electronic warfare provided to the Ukrainians.”
Any new incursion would expand a conflict that has festered since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and destabilized the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine while denying involvement in the fighting. A pair of pacts known as the Minsk agreements offered the potential to end the fighting on terms that would give Russian proxies a permanent place in the Ukrainian political system.
That Minsk deal has not been implemented as the Ukrainians and Russians trade blame and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky resists concessions that would give the Kremlin an unacceptable victory in the war. Russian dialogues with Western allies have begun on two tracks in recent weeks, with initial talks not only about Russia’s maximalist demands regarding the structure of NATO, but also about the renewal of the diplomatic bloc that produced the Minsk agreements. Putin broached that subject in a separate conversation with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
“Vladimir Putin gave an appraisal of actions taken by Kiev, which is evading compliance with its commitments regarding, primarily, political aspects of resolving the domestic conflict in Ukraine,” the Kremlin summary of their conversation noted. “The need for the Kyiv authorities to take concrete steps in order to implement the Minsk Package of Measures was emphasized.”
That controversy is a crucial factor in the current potential for war, according to one of Jones’s colleagues.
“This is much more driven by frustrations that existing paths to resolve — you know, to break the impasse in the Minsk negotiations, to ensure that Russia has a lever over Ukraine, this is not really working anymore,” CSIS fellow Andrew Lohsen said. “What we’re seeing now is this willingness to risk a different kind of conflict with Ukraine to kind of up the ante once more, just to regain some of that leverage that seems to have been lost as the Minsk negotiations have broken down over the last couple of years.”
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In any case, Putin’s team made clear that the Kremlin has not said its final word in response to the U.S. and NATO proposals for how to find a diplomatic off-ramp.
“For the time being, the Russian Federation’s fundamental response on, perhaps, the main issue nowadays has not been submitted,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “Currently, this response is being prepared, and there was simply a mix-up.”
