A day after largely fruitless talks with the United States and on the eve of a rare meeting with NATO to discuss the situation in Ukraine, Russia began a live-action military exercise near the border with the troubled neighbor.
The military maneuver includes, according to the Russian agency Interfax, 3,000 troops, T-72B3 tanks, BMP-2 transport tanks and artillery pieces in regions close to Ukraine, such as Rostov, and close to Belarus. Exactly the kind of weapons that would be used in an invasion of Ukraine, the fear of which is the subject of intense diplomatic movement.
The exercise highlights personnel and equipment involved in Vladimir Putin’s massive movement of 100,000 men starting in November, which prompted Western accusations that he was preparing an attack to support pro-Russian rebels in Donbass.
Once commonplace, the exercise was designed to put pressure on the West. On Monday (10), Russian and American representatives spent seven hours meeting to discuss the case of Ukraine and other European security issues in Geneva.
In the talks, the US made it clear that it does not accept Putin’s ultimatum to withdraw NATO forces from member countries that joined after 1997, that is, return to Cold War-era borders, not including nations that were part of the Soviet sphere. .
The idea of ​​barring new accessions was also rejected, namely from countries such as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, which were part of the Soviet Union (1922-1991) and which, for the Kremlin to be strategically satisfied, must at least be neutral, when.
A conversational door remained open with questions surrounding the placement of intermediate-range missiles and about clarification on the nature of side-by-side military exercises.
This Wednesday (12), another Russian delegation is going to Brussels to meet with the NATO summit, a US-led military alliance of 30 countries. A bombastic advance is not expected, but the fact that diplomatic contacts between the bloc and Moscow are now cut off already makes the meeting a positive fact in itself.
The meeting will take place within the framework of the so-called NATO-Russia Council, which has not met since 2019.
In the second, the Russians repeated what Putin had already said, that he does not intend to invade. In practice, it would be a very difficult undertaking, unlike the annexation of a mostly Russian area, as the president promoted in Crimea in 2014.
That year, fearing that the new Ukrainian government would join the Western military structure, Putin not only promoted the absorption of the peninsula, but fomented the civil war that effectively separated two pieces of eastern Ukraine from Kiev’s control.
With the exercises, the Kremlin gives a signal of readiness while the conversations take place. His spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said on Tuesday there was “no reason for optimism” in the diplomatic round, adding a somber tone.
Putin savors a strategic victory in Central Asia, where he helped Kazakhstan’s autocrat quell a serious uprising last week by deploying troops from his own military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization.
Feeling the pressure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday that he thanked both the Russians and the Americans for their efforts, and that “it is time to agree on an end to the conflict”. He called for a return to the so-called Normandy format of negotiations, sitting at the table with Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron and new German Prime Minister Olaf Scholz.
“We are prepared to make the necessary decisions at a summit with the leaders of the four countries,” he said. There was no response from the Russian side, which is awaiting the West’s denials this week to propose the next step — which should be to try to extract concessions from Kiev backed by its troops.
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