https://ift.tt/2hmzSPD President Vladimir Putin said his aides are preparing a discussion document outlining the Kremlin’s views on what is needed for strategic stability and security on the continent of Europe, which will also further detail Moscow’s objections to Ukraine joining NATO.
The document will be shared with Washington within a week, Putin said.
In his first public remarks since a high-stakes, two-hour video conference with U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday, Putin once again accused NATO of being “openly confrontational against Russia” and “quite hostile to us,” but added, “We don’t want confrontation with anyone.”
Putin spoke during a press conference Wednesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi after face-to-face talks with Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the first leader of a NATO country to see him since Tuesday’s video conference. Biden and Putin appeared to make little headway in their talks and traded accusations over a Russian military buildup near Ukraine, which U.S. and Ukrainian officials fear is a prelude to an invasion.
During their talks, Biden outlined to his Russian counterpart the punitive steps America and its NATO allies will take should Moscow decide to invade Ukraine. Western officials hope the threat of sanctions, which will target among other institutions Russian banks, will be enough to dissuade Putin from ordering any large-scale incursion into Ukraine. According to both U.S. and Russian officials, Putin demanded legal guarantees that NATO would not expand further east and allow Ukraine to join as a member.
Washington has warned European allies that the Kremlin may be “attempting to rehash” 2014, when it annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and Russia-backed separatists seized a large part of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, bordering Russia. Kremlin officials maintain that Russia is not getting ready to invade Ukraine and accuse Ukrainians of mobilizing military units along their shared border.
“If Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures. We would provide additional defensive material to the Ukrainians above and beyond that which we are already providing,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters in a White House briefing following the virtual summit.