Russia warns it may abandon diplomacy as talks hit impasse
VIENNA — Russian officials signaled Thursday that they could abandon diplomatic efforts to resolve the security crisis surrounding Ukraine, bringing a whirlwind week of European diplomacy to an ominous end and deflating hopes that negotiators could forge a path toward easing tensions in Eastern Europe.
One senior Russian diplomat said that talks with the West were approaching a “dead end,” while another said the Kremlin would wait until it receives written responses next week to its demands from Washington and from NATO before deciding how to proceed.
It was clear that Russia’s next move would be up to President Vladimir Putin.
“The United States and its allies are actually saying ‘no’ to key elements of these texts,” Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said, referring to draft agreements that Russia published last month. “This is what we call a dead end or a different approach.”
The U.S. representative to Thursday’s meeting, Michael Carpenter, also depicted the two sides as engaged in a standoff with no clear resolution.
Echoing the growing pessimism in Washington that the week’s discussions had de-escalated tensions, Carpenter told reporters that “the drumbeat of war is sounding loud, and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill.”
Russia is demanding that NATO drastically scale back its presence near Russia’s borders in Eastern Europe, including stopping all military cooperation with Ukraine and providing legally binding guarantees that the country will never join the alliance. Ryabkov said dialogue with the United States was continuing but warned that Putin was receiving options from the military about what to do “in the case of a deterioration of the situation.”
Those options, analysts and Western officials believe, are likely to involve new Russian military action against Ukraine. Joining this week’s discussions for the first time Thursday, Ukraine said it had identified 106,000 Russian troops and 1,500 tanks near its border.
Thursday’s gathering, the last of three negotiating sessions this week between Russia and the West, took place in Vienna at a meeting of the 57-country Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a group that includes Russia and Ukraine as well as the United States.
The West insists all countries must have the freedom to choose their alliances.