US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has stated that he will not provide any written response to his Russian Prime Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva on Wednesday (01.19.2022) during his visit to Ukraine. Security guarantees sought by Russia to prevent NATO expansion and the laying of offensive weapons towards its borders. After sending tens of thousands of troops to its borders with Ukraine, Lavrov submitted particularly detailed draft proposals to the United States.
“I’m not going to present any document to Secretary of State Lavrov at the time. “We will see where we are after Friday,” he told reporters after meeting with his Ukrainian envoy Dimitrov Kuleba, who stressed that if the diplomatic path did not succeed, “Russia has chosen a different path.”
Blinken reiterated that some Russian demands, such as the commitment that NATO should never expand to include Ukraine (to the east), “clearly and utterly fail.” Instead of proposing counter-proposals, the US diplomat continued in last week’s talks that “we have expressed our concern about Russia’s challenges to the security of the European space.”
Russia seeks “instability.”
During talks in Switzerland last week, Washington proposed an agreement with Moscow on arms control. “We talked about issues that could be improved on a reciprocal basis, if there was a clear, option to improve everyone’s security,” Blingen added.
The foreign secretary stressed that Russia had “almost 100,000” troops stationed on the border with Ukraine and could “double” its military presence “in the short term, and condemned Moscow’s use of all means since 2014 to destabilize Ukraine. First with the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and then with the Battle of Donbass. “The Russian occupation has so far killed more than 14,000 Ukrainian men, women and children and left 1.5 million Ukrainians homeless,” he stressed.
Plinken’s visit seeks to show US support for democracy and Ukraine’s “right to exist.” Washington wants to continue to help Kiev “defend itself” with increased security assistance to $ 300 million by 2022.
DZC (EFE, AFP)
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