U.S. and Russia still far apart on Ukraine after Geneva talks

GENEVA, (Reuters) - Russia and the United States gave no sign of narrowing their differences on Ukraine and wider European security in talks in Geneva yesterday, as Moscow repeated demands that Washington says it cannot accept.

Russia has massed troops near Ukraine’s border and demanded the U.S.-led NATO alliance rule out admitting the former Soviet state or expanding further into what Moscow sees as its back yard.

“Unfortunately we have a great disparity in our principled approaches to this. The U.S. and Russia in some ways have opposite views on what needs to be done,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told a news conference.

“We were firm ... in pushing back on security proposals that are simply non-starters to the United States,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said in a separate telephone briefing after nearly eight hours of talks with Ryabkov.

However, Sherman also hinted at the possibility of mutual compromises, saying Washington was open to discussing missile deployments in Europe as well as limiting the size and scope of military exercises.

Washington and Kyiv say 100,000 Russian troops moved to within striking distance of Ukraine could be preparing a new invasion, eight years after Russia seized the Crimean peninsula from its neighbour.

Russia denies any such plans and says it is responding to what it calls aggressive behaviour from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine, which has tilted toward the West and aspires to join the alliance.

Ryabkov repeated a set of sweeping demands including a ban on further NATO expansion and an end to its activity in the central and eastern European countries that joined after 1997.