The situation in Ukraine just got exponentially worse on Friday. With thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and vehicles on the Ukraine border, Russian President Vladimir Putin is making public his list of demands from NATO and President Biden.
Russia outlined on Friday its demands for a sweeping new security arrangement with the West in Eastern Europe, with the most far-reaching request a written guarantee that NATO will not expand farther east toward Russia and will end all military activity in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus.
The Russians also said they wanted NATO to remove all military infrastructure installed in Eastern Europe after 1997 — demands that analysts said seemed unacceptable to the West.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergey A. Ryabkov, offered the details about the proposal in public for the first time on Friday, in a video news conference in Moscow, amid a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine’s border.
The demands went far beyond the current conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. And most were directed not at Ukraine, which is threatened by the troop buildup, but at the United States and Ukraine’s other Western allies.
They included a request for a NATO commitment that it would not offer membership to Ukraine specifically. But NATO countries are unlikely to formally rule out future membership for Eastern European countries.
The proposal highlighted starkly differing views in the United States and Russia on the military tensions over Ukraine. Russia has insisted that the West has been fomenting the crisis by instilling anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine, and by providing weapons. Mr. Ryabkov cast the confrontation in Ukraine as a critical threat to Russia’s security.
The United States and European allies, in contrast, say Russia provoked the security crisis by recently deploying tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine’s border.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia voiced some of the demands more broadly in recent weeks. But this formal Russian offer on Friday for defusing the tensions on Ukraine’s border followed a video call between President Biden and Mr. Putin on Dec. 7. After the call, Mr. Biden said he was willing to hear the Russians out.
Russian officials said diplomats conveyed the proposal to a senior American diplomat, the State Department’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, on Wednesday during meetings in Moscow. Afterward, Ms. Donfried said in a video statement that she would relay the ideas to Washington as well as to NATO allies during a stop this week in Brussels.
The Russian Foreign Ministry had said in a statement last week that Moscow was seeking a document with “legal and obligatory character” prohibiting any further expansion of NATO eastward in Europe. The Russian proposal took the form of a draft statement from NATO.
“Member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization accept the obligation to exclude farther expansion of NATO to Ukraine and other states,” the text suggested as an acceptable guarantee for Russia.
As I've been saying for some time now, Putin wants a new Soviet Empire, and he wants it at the direct expense of America and the West. These are hostage demands, straight up: you can let me take Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe without firing a shot, or we can do this the hard way.
It's up to Joe Biden to make the call here. Biden's talking economic sanctions, Putin's talking rolling tanks into Kyiv. It's the Cold War days all over again, the ones that supposedly died when I was in high school and college, but a shooting war in Ukraine is going to kill thousands.
It's important to note that if Trump were still in charge, he'd be on the first plane to Moscow to agree to Putin's hostage deal, and he would use this as his argument that the US needed to drop out of NATO immediately. Ukraine would be on their own.
Biden's way forward -- hitting Putin in the wallet along with the rest of the Western World -- may not work however if China continues to play ball with him.
We'll see.
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