“We had it with the Soviet Union for decades before that.” Sullivan told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We’ve had a dialogue with Russia on European security issues for the last 20 years,” Mr. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said in Washington on Friday that while the Russians had a list of security concerns, so did the United States and its European allies, and that Washington was willing to negotiate on that basis.
The officials also suggested that if Russia did make a major new military incursion into Ukraine, as it seems to be planning, NATO would strongly consider moving more troops into allied countries bordering Ukraine, like Poland and the Baltic countries, because the “strategic depth” against Russia that Ukraine now provides would be damaged or lost. They emphasized their openness to a diplomatic dialogue on Russia’s security concerns, but said that any discussion would also include NATO’s security concerns about Russian missile deployments, satellite tests and disinformation efforts. NATO officials said on Friday that Russia’s proposals were unacceptable in their demands for veto power over now-independent countries. The United States and European allies, in contrast, say Russia provoked the security crisis by recently deploying tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine’s border. Ryabkov cast the confrontation in Ukraine as a critical threat to Russia’s security. Russia has insisted that the West has been fomenting the crisis by instilling anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine, and by providing weapons. The proposal highlighted starkly differing views in the United States and Russia on the military tensions over Ukraine.
But NATO officials emphasized that NATO countries will not rule out future membership for any Eastern European countries, including Ukraine. They included a request for a NATO commitment that it would not offer membership to Ukraine specifically. And most were directed not at Ukraine, which is threatened by the troop buildup, but at the United States and Ukraine’s other Western allies.
The demands went far beyond the current conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Ryabkov, laid out details about the proposal in public for the first time on Friday in a video news conference in Moscow, amid a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine’s border that Western officials have interpreted as a threat of an invasion. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei A. Putin seemed willing to take ever-greater risks to force the West to take Russian security concerns seriously and to address historical grievances largely ignored for decades. The demands also reinforced the notion that Mr. Putin, who analysts say is growing increasingly concerned that Ukraine is drifting irretrievably into a Western orbit, posing a grave threat to Russian security. They represent in startling clarity goals long sought by Mr. Putin in a video call with President Biden.
The proposals codified a series of demands floated in various forms in recent weeks by Russian officials, including by President Vladimir V. The Russian proposal - immediately dismissed by NATO officials - came in the form of a draft treaty suggesting NATO should offer written guarantees that it would not expand farther east toward Russia and halt all military activities in the former Soviet republics, a vast swath of now-independent states extending from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. KYIV, Ukraine - Russia demanded on Friday that the United States and its allies halt all military activity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in a sweeping proposal that would establish a Cold War-like security arrangement, posing a challenge to diplomatic efforts to defuse Russia’s growing military threat to Ukraine.