On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said security talks between Washington and Moscow will begin immediately after Russia’s new year holiday season, which lasts through January 9th.
“It is with the US that we will carry out the main work of negotiations, which will take place immediately after the new year holidays end,” Lavrov said.
Russia has submitted a list of security proposals to the US amid simmering tensions surrounding Ukraine. Chief among Russia’s concerns are over NATO expansion, and Moscow wants guarantees that Ukraine won’t join the Western military alliance. US officials have agreed to start talks on the Russian proposals in January.
Separately, NATO is expected to convene a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council to hold talks with Moscow. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is looking to hold the meeting on January 12th.
Over the weekend, Russian media reported that over 10,000 Russian troops are returning to their permanent bases after holding drills in areas near Ukraine. The move could be meant to reduce tensions ahead of the security talks.
Since November, the US has been claiming Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine, an accusation Moscow denies. For their part, Russia says the increase in US and NATO activity in the region is the source of tensions and is hoping to finally deal with the issue in the upcoming negotiations.
It’s a TRAP. I’m not the smartest man on Earth but it’s easy to see if NATO and the USA cared one bit about the Ukraine , they already would have made them a member of NATO. All this saber rattling from them over the safety of the Ukrainians at the hands of the evil Russians wanting to invade makes no sense , then why don’t they just make them a member of NATO.
Again it doesn’t take much brain power to work out that this an obvious TRAP to suck in Russia into invading the Ukraine to then add more sanctions and cut off Russia to supplying Europe its energy needs to benefit the economic welfare of 🇺🇸.
Russia is not that stupid, if America fails to guarantee Russia its obvious safety concerns of NATO expansionism towards Moscow next month.
Then it’ll highly likely we’ll soon see another crisis event like the Cuban missile Crisis of 1962.
“The move could be meant to reduce tensions ahead of the security talks.”
Or, you know, not. Russian Christmas is coming up in January. Terminating the scheduled training before then is logical. Rotating those troops back to their permanent assignments is also what every military does. Rotating new troops into those training bases after Russian Christmas is also highly likely. The whimpering need to see signs of “improvement” in this crisis is stifling.
Here is the sign you need to see: Ukraine pulls back most of the half of its army that is on the contact line. Until that is done, nothing has changed. And to quote Percival Rose again, “That ain’t gonna happen.”