MOSCOW: Russia maintained a tough posture amid the pressures over its troop buildup near Ukraine, with a top diplomat warning on Wednesday that Moscow will accept nothing lower but the penetrable US guarantees preventing Nato’s expansion to Ukraine.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who led the Russian delegation at the security addresses with the US in Geneva last week, reaffirmed that Moscow has no intentions of overrunning Ukraine as the West fears, but said that entering Western security guarantees is the categoric imperative for Moscow.
The addresses in Geneva and an affiliated Nato-Russia meeting in Brussels last week were held as Russia has amassed estimated colors near Ukraine in what the West fears might herald an irruption.
In a move that further beefs up forces near Ukraine, Russia has transferred an unidentified number of colors from the country’s far east to its supporter Belarus, which shares a border with Ukraine, for major war games coming month. Ukrainian officers have said that Moscow could use Belarusian home to launch an implicit multi-pronged irruption.
The Russian Defence Ministry said that some of its colors formerly have arrived in Belarus for the Allied Resolve 2022 drills. It said the exercise will be held at five blasting ranges and other areas in Belarus and also involve four Belarusian airbases.
Amid the soaring pressures, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Ukraine on Wednesday to assure it of Western support in the face of what he called grim Russian aggression.
Russia has denied that it intends to attack its neighbor but demanded guarantees from the West that Nato won’t expand to Ukraine or other former Soviet nations or place its colors and munitions there. It also has prompted Nato to roll back the deployments of its colors and munitions to Central and Eastern European nations that have joined the alliance after the end of the Cold War.
Washington and its abettors forcefully rejected Moscow’s demands but kept the door open to possible further addresses on arms control and confidence- structure measures intended to reduce the eventuality for conflict.
Ryabkov claimed, still, that there can’t be any meaningful addresses on those issues if the West doesn’t heed the main Russian requests for the non-expansion of Nato.
He advised that the Russian demands contained in draft agreements with the US and Nato constitute a package, and we’re not prepared to divide it into the different corridors, to start recycling some of those at the expenditure of standing idle on others.
The Russian diplomat underscored that Ukraine’s decreasingly close ties with Nato abettors pose a major security challenge to Russia.
We see the trouble of Ukraine getting ever more integrated into Nato without indeed acquiring a formal status of a Nato member state, Ryabkov said, pointing at Western powers supplying Ukraine with munitions, training its colors, and conducting common drills. This is a commodity that goes right to the center of Russia’s public security interests, and we will do our utmost to reverse this situation, to rebalance this situation through political means.
Russia adjoined the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 after mass demurrers urged Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly leader to flee to Russia. At the same time, Russia also cast its support behind a separatist insurrection that swept over large areas in eastern Ukraine. Further, people have been killed nearly eight times by fighting there.
Asked if Russia could accept a doldrums on Nato’s expansion eastward, an idea circulated by some political experts, Ryabkov answered with a firm no, saying that Moscow has seen the West countermanding on former pledges.
He emphasized that “ for us, the matter of precedence is achievement of watertight, bulletproof, fairly binding guarantees that Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations won’t join the alliance.
Ryabkov suggested that the US could also take a unilateral obligation to noway bounce for Nato class for Ukraine and other rex-Soviet nations.
