Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated, yesterday, his statement from November 18, that Russia no longer will accept verbal promises, but insists “on the elaboration of concrete agreements that would rule out any further eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of weapons systems posing a threat to us in close proximity to Russia’s territory.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov followed up on that message today in his meetings at the OSCE Foreign Ministers meeting in Stockholm today.
“Everyone has heard President Putin and grown aware that our proposals are serious and now we are formulating them in writing,” Lavrov told reporters on the sidelines of the OSCE meeting, according to Tass.
“We are not saying that security guarantees must be given to us. We are saying, as President Putin emphasized yesterday, that collective guarantees ensuring the security of each other and all the participants in the pan-European process should be worked out…. It is important to see how seriously the Western community will treat this and how sincerely they are interested in de-escalation and the cessation of attempts to unilaterally build up their advantages, including in the form of military infrastructure, the armed forces and hardware.”
Lavrov drew out the choice faced, in his bilateral meeting with Secretary of State Tony Blinken today. Tass reported in a separate wire, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry, that Lavrov had informed Blinken that “Ukraine’s involvement in the US geopolitical games against the background of NATO’s deployment in the immediate vicinity of Russia’s borders ‘will have the most serious consequences’ and will force [Moscow] to take retaliatory measures to redress the military-strategic balance. Sergey Lavrov pointed out that ‘long-term security guarantees on our Western borders would be the alternative that should be considered as a pressing requirement,’ the ministry stressed.”
