US reiterates stance on Ukraine in call with Russia, amid flurry of diplomacy: What we know
exchanged sharp accusations at the United Nations Security Council.
The Kremlin is seeking legally binding guarantees from the U.S. and NATO that Ukraine will never join the bloc, deployment of NATO weapons near Russian borders will be halted and the alliance’s forces will be rolled back from Eastern Europe.
The demands were rejected by NATO and the U.S. as nonstarters.
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Washington has provided Moscow with a written response to the demands, and on Monday, three Biden administration officials said that the Russian government sent a written response to the U.S. proposals. The State Department hasn’t offered details about the document, with one State Department official telling the Associated Press it “would be unproductive to negotiate in public” and that they would leave it up to Russia to discuss the counterproposal.
But Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko on Tuesday told Russia’s state RIA Novosti news agency that this was “not true.”
The agency also cited an unnamed senior diplomat in the Russian Foreign Ministry as saying Lavrov sent a message to his Western colleagues, including Blinken, about “the principle of indivisibility of security,” but it wasn’t a response to Washington’s proposals.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday that there has been “confusion” and said that Russia’s response to the U.S. proposals is still in the works. What was passed on to Western officials “were other considerations, on a somewhat different issue,” Peskov said.
More:What are Joe Biden’s options with Russia in Ukraine? That all depends on Putin’s next move.
Ukraine’s army will grow
In the meantime, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree on Tuesday expanding the country’s army by 100,000 troops, bringing the total number to 350,000.
Zelenskyy, who in recent days sought to calm the nation in the wake of fears of an imminent invasion, said Tuesday that he signed “this decree not because of a war.” “This decree is so that there is peace soon and further down the line,” the president said.
Ukraine’s security chief said Russian forces massed on the border haven’t made the kind of preparations that signal an imminent invasion, and he warned that sowing panic could lead to internal unrest that would benefit Moscow.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told The Associated Press that about 120,000 Russian troops are concentrated near Ukraine and Moscow, but said an imminent invasion would require massive preparations that would be easily spotted.
“We can’t allow panic in the country,” Danilov told the Associated Press. “It’s very difficult for us to maintain control over the economic situation when all the media keep saying that the war will start tomorrow. Panic is a sister of defeat.”
He said Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes to achieve his goal of destroying Ukraine through internal destabilization even without an invasion.
Contributing: Associated Press