Russia says talks with NATO over Ukraine have reached a dead end | Russia

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Russia said talks with NATO over Ukraine had reached a dead end, while threatening to take unspecified “necessary measures” if its demands were not met.

A barrage of pessimistic statements from top Russian officials emerged when Poland’s foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, warned that Europe faced the greatest risk of war in 30 years.

Rao was addressing the 57 member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the third time this week that Russia has discussed security with Western countries.

“I cannot say that a breakthrough is imminent” in discussions on European security, the Polish minister, who holds the presidency of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told reporters, while vowing to launch a dialogue. “Some of the participating countries think that it is enough to make a statement and not participate in the discussion,” he said, without mentioning the names of the countries.

“The risk of war in the OSCE region appears to be greater now than at any time in the past 30 years,” Rao told delegates earlier. “For several weeks now we have been facing the possibility of a major military escalation in Eastern Europe.”

Russia has amassed 100,000 soldiers and military hardware along its border with Ukraine, while issuing a series of security demands that NATO has said were impossible to meet, such as withdrawing troops from the alliance’s eastern members and blocking any membership request from Kiev. .

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who led the Russian delegation in talks with the United States on Monday, said discussions had reached an impasse. “I don’t see any reason to sit down again in the coming days to meet again and start the same discussions,” he was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

We suggest going step by step through the text, working on it in order to get it to a point where it is ready to be signed. This is impossible today, because in the main elements of these texts, the United States and its allies say categorically “no”.

Speaking on Russian television, he did not rule out the possibility that Russia would deploy military hardware in Cuba or Venezuela, saying that “it all depends on the actions of our American counterparts.”

Separately, Russia’s mission in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe threatened that the country would take “necessary measures” if the West did not respond to Russian demands. “If we do not hear a constructive response to our proposals within a reasonable time frame and aggressive behavior towards them [Russia] Continue, we will have to take the necessary measures to ensure strategic balance and eliminate unacceptable threats to our national security,” Russia’s mission to the OSCE wrote on Twitter, citing its ambassador to the OSCE, Alexander Lukashevich.

The Russian mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe also warned that “a crisis on the continent may arise with unpredictable consequences for European security.”

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that there could be a complete break in US-Russian relations, if proposed sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, and other senior civilian and military leaders were adopted. Senate Democrats have also suggested targeting Russia’s leading financial institutions if Moscow sends troops to Ukraine.

The European Union is also imposing possible sanctions, although it declined to disclose details.

Senior Russian officials met their US counterparts on Monday and NATO on Wednesday, but the talks failed to produce results. On Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the military alliance was ready to hold talks with Moscow on arms control and transparency over military exercises.

It seemed that the Russian Foreign Minister refused this offer. There were nuances in the discussions, Ryabkov said, but on Russia’s main issue – the lack of NATO expansion – the talks were “impenetrable, at least, for the time being”. “This is concerning because we have not hidden that everything else depends on progress in this matter,” he added.

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