The discussions in Kyiv, the first in a
series of European crisis talks that will also include a meeting Friday with
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, come amid what U.S. officials have described as a growing list
of destabilizing actions by Russia.
Those include what officials say are potential “false flag” operations in
eastern Ukraine, live-fire
exercises near the Ukraine-Russia border and, this week, the movement of
Russian troops into Ukraine’s
pro-Moscow neighbor, Belarus.
The Kremlin, which sent troops into Ukraine
to seize Crimea in 2014, has denied any plans
for another invasion and instead accused NATO of threatening its security by
expanding to the east. The Biden administration in recent about
Russia’s
military plans, as officials cautioned ahead of Blinken’s departure that an
attack could come “at any time.” On Wednesday, Blinken said that Moscow could double its force of about 100,000 troops
deployed around Ukraine
in “relatively short order.”
But Blinken also described a larger
threat, telling U.S. Embassy employees that the implications of Russia’s actions were “bigger than Ukraine,”
challenging global principles of national sovereignty and territorial
integrity.
“If we allow those principles to be
violated with impunity, then we will open a very large Pandora’s box,” Blinken
said. “The entire world is watching what is happening here.”
To help Ukraine
defend itself, the Biden administration is providing the country with an
additional $200 million in military assistance, While the United States
has so far declined to provide air defense systems and more significant
offensive weapons, Blinken said more arms would be approved if Russian troops
roll across the border.
“Should Russia carry
through with any aggressive intent and renew its aggression and invade Ukraine, we’ll
provide additional material beyond [what] is already in the pipeline,” he said
in remarks to the news media alongside Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. He
provided no details about what kind of weaponry that might include.
Ukrainian officials in turn described
the United States
as a key security partner. “I am grateful to the U.S.
for standing shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine at this time and working
together on the comprehensive deterrence package,” Kuleba said.
Blinken’s trip to Europe this week will
culminate with his meeting with Lavrov in Geneva,
an encounter that U.S.
officials suggested might indicate an openness among Russian leaders to a
peaceful resolution of the standoff.
But ahead of the talks, Russian officials
have continued to blame the West for stoking fears about further conflict in Ukraine.“We see weapons shipments there; we see various maneuvers; we see NATO
and Western European countries flying over,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
said in Moscow.
“This all just leads to tension around Ukraine.”
While Moscow in recent weeks has put
forward proposals to impose formal limits to
NATO’s eastward enlargement and alliance activities in Eastern Europe, European
and U.S. officials have dismissed those ideas, saying NATO’s “open door” to
potential members, including Ukraine, cannot be altered.
Washington instead has proposed
measures on arms control and military exercises, which so far appear to have
gained little traction on the Russian side.
Peskov, like other Russian officials, said that Russia would require written U.S. answers to
Russian proposals to move the diplomacy ahead, something he said he hoped would
occur in the next few days.
But Blinken suggested that the United States was not ready for
such a step.
“I won’t be presenting a paper at that
time to Foreign Minister Lavrov,” Blinken said. “We need to see where we are
and see if there remain opportunities to pursue the diplomacy and pursue the
dialogue, which again, as I said, is by far the preferable course.”
In a sign of the quick pace of events,
Blinken’s meeting with Lavrov was announced on Tuesday just hours before his
departure from Washington, only after his
travel to Ukraine and a
subsequent stop in Germany
were made public.
Speaking in Moscow
on Wednesday, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov suggested that Washington should unilaterally agree to refrain from
voting to eventually admit Ukraine
into NATO — a step he said would be easier than securing agreement from all 30
NATO members.He said that Russia
could not wait indefinitely for a resolution to its security demands and said
the ball was “on Washington’s
side.”
Asked whether he saw room for
compromise on Russia’s
demand to limit NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe,
Blinken said that some of the demands were “absolute nonstarters.”
“So again, I think through these
conversations that we’ve already had, it’s a way of refining what’s really at
the heart of this, and seeing if there are grounds for dealing with those,” he
said.
While the Biden administration and
European partners have promised to apply severe economic pressure, including
sanctions and potential steps to exclude Russia from the global financial
system, former officials and experts doubt that will significantly influence
Putin’s decisions.
U.S. officials say they
also fear that Russia could
increase its use of methods short of outright invasion to further destabilize Ukraine,
including what they allege are disinformation and digital warfare activities.
On Friday, a significant cyberattack disrupted Ukrainian government websites.
Russian-backed separatists have also been fighting Ukraine’s
forces in its eastern Donetsk
and Luhansk regions since 2014.
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