NATO shoots down Russian ultimatum as dispute flares after Blinken-Lavrov meeting

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s team renewed its demand for U.S. and Western European countries to abandon NATO’s Eastern European members, drawing a prompt rebuke just hours after a dialogue in Geneva that Western officials hoped would ease the risk of additional war in Ukraine.

“We are talking about the withdrawal of foreign forces, equipment, and weapons, as well as taking other steps to return to the set-up we had in 1997 in non-NATO countries,” Lavrov’s team said in a Friday bulletin. “This includes Bulgaria and Romania.”

That reiteration of Russia’s position drew a prompt response from NATO. “NATO will not renounce our ability to protect and defend each other, including with the presence of troops in the eastern part of the Alliance,” replied NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu. “Russia’s demands would create first and second class NATO members, which we cannot accept.”

That sharp exchange exemplifies the persistent risk of an expanded invasion of Ukraine, despite Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s effort to find an “off-ramp” from the brewing crisis. Lavrov’s team touted the demand most intolerable to U.S. and European allies as “one of the cornerstones of Russia’s initiatives,” an ominous signal from Moscow, as Blinken confirmed that the United States will respond “in more detail and in writing” next week to the maximalist “draft treaty” that Russian officials unveiled before Christmas.

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“They are not willing to negotiate on proper terms,” Atlantic Council visiting fellow Petr Tuma, a career Czech diplomat, told the Washington Examiner. “They keep this really nonstarter approach, [which suggests] that the negotiation is not what they are interested in, maybe.”

Washington and Moscow’s Eastern European partners signaled their preparation for a surge in violence in Ukraine. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania announced that they “are working together expeditiously” to transfer U.S.-made armaments to Ukraine, including one weapon made famous during the Cold War, when American officials armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan with anti-aircraft missiles to fight the Soviet Union.

“Estonia will provide Javelin anti-armor missiles, while Latvia and Lithuania will provide Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and adjacent equipment to bolster Ukraine’s defensive military capabilities,” the defense ministries of the Baltic states said in a joint release. “We sincerely hope that Ukraine will face no need to use this equipment and call on Russian Federation to [cease] its aggressive and irresponsible behavior.”

Just across Lithuania’s border, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko issued a bellicose denunciation of NATO.

“Should they not simply keep poking us constantly, but deploy their armies against us, threaten us, then we will hit so hard, it won’t be pretty,” said Lukashenko, who spoke as a member of the so-called Union State that Putin has pressed him to accept in the months since mass Belarusian protests against election fraud deepened Lukashenko’s dependence on the Kremlin. “I repeat, in case someone missed it: It won’t be pretty … This is why we do not want to fight a war. We also do not want it because we remember the war that we had 70 years ago.”

Russian forces moved into Belarus earlier this week, prompting U.S. officials to warn Lukashenko against participation in an expanded Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“We’ve seen plans to undertake a variety of destabilizing actions, some of them short of the overuse of force, to destabilize Ukraine, to topple the government, a variety of things,” Blinken told reporters after meeting with Lavrov in Geneva. “If Russia wants to begin to convince the world that it has no aggressive intent toward Ukraine, a very good place to start would be by … removing its forces from Ukraine’s borders, as well as engaging in diplomacy and dialogue, which is what we did today and what we plan to continue doing in the days and weeks ahead.”

Lavrov’s description of the meeting as “constructive and useful” contributed to the perception that Moscow might not invade Ukraine.

“Negotiations will continue until Russia wants to withdraw from them. But the West is not yet making any fundamental concessions to Russia,” International Crisis Group’s senior analyst Oleg Ignatov told Deutsche Welle. “If Russia bluffs, the negotiations will go on for a long time and then, perhaps by demanding a lot, Russia will be satisfied with some non-fundamental concessions, for example, on Ukraine.”

Tuma, the Czech official seconded to the Atlantic Council in Washington, surmised “that Putin is somehow surprised by the strength and the coherence of West’s stances, at least comparing to 2014,” when Russian forces annexed Crimea and destabilized eastern Ukraine.

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“The reaction might be going a bit farther than he expected, and it’s really a million-dollar question where it will lead,” Tuma said. “Whether it will push him to the path of deescalation, that he will try to save his face and get something, or get ballistic, on the other hand — get mad and go farther in.”

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