U.K. PM cites ‘a dangerous moment’ in Ukraine crisis
MOSCOW — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Thursday the Ukraine crisis has grown into “the most dangerous moment” for Europe in decades, while his top diplomat held icy talks with her Moscow counterpart who said the Kremlin won’t accept lectures from the West.
Amid the deadlock, Russian forces held sweeping manoeuvres north of Ukraine in Belarus, part of a buildup of over 100,000 troops that has stoked Western fears of an invasion.
NATO also has stepped up military deployments to bolster its eastern flank, with the U.S. sending troops to Poland and Romania. A British Royal Air Force jet carrying 350 troops landed Thursday in Poland in a move that followed London sending anti-tank missiles to Ukraine to help boost its defences.
“This is probably the most dangerous moment, I would say in the course of the next few days, in what is the biggest security crisis that Europe has faced for decades, and we’ve got to get it right,” Johnson said at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Johnson, who later flew to Warsaw to meet with Poland’s prime minister, said he believes President Vladimir Putin has not yet decided what he might do with Ukraine, adding that the West must use “sanctions and military resolve plus diplomacy.”
“Poland and the U.K. won’t accept a world in which a powerful neighbour can bully or attack their neighbours,” he said before meeting the British soldiers in Poland.
Johnson told British broadcaster that if the Russians “want less NATO on their western borders, as it were, this is exactly the wrong way to go about it.”
“We stand on the edge of a precipice and things are as dangerous as I have seen them in Europe for a very, very long time,” he said, adding that it’s up to Putin “to disengage and deescalate.” Speaking in Moscow, Putin said Russia was continuing a series of talks with the U.S. and its allies and is working on a reply to Western security proposals.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he sent a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov repeating an invitation to a series of talks on improving European security.
Lavrov set a stern tone for his talks in Moscow with U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who again warned Russia that attacking its neighbour would “have massive consequences and carry severe costs.” She urged the Kremlin to abide by international agreements that commit it to respecting Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty.
Lavrov rejected Western worries about the Russian troop buildup as “sheer propaganda” and noted that Moscow won’t stand for lectures.
“Ideological approaches, ultimatums and moralizing is a road to nowhere,” he said, noting that his talks with Truss marked the first meeting of the countries’ top diplomats in more than four years as Russia-U.K. ties have been ravaged by the 2018 poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in England, along with other tensions.
Russia says it has no plans to invade Ukraine, but wants the West to keep Ukraine and other former Soviet countries out of NATO. It also wants NATO to refrain from deploying weapons there and roll back alliance forces from Eastern Europe. The U.S. and NATO flatly reject these demands.
Truss reaffirmed a call for Moscow to pull back its troops, while Lavrov rejected the demand as inappropriate and pointed to British and NATO military buildups in Eastern Europe.
The daily Kommersant reported that as part of the tense exchange, Lavrov emphasized Moscow’s right to deploy its forces on its own territory and asked Truss if she recognizes the Voronezh and Rostov regions in southwestern Russia as part of the country, to which she answered, “no.” Asked about the gaffe, Truss told the Russian news outlet RBC that she thought Lavrov was referring to territories in Ukraine, but then confirmed that the regions that he mentioned were part of Russia.