Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to turn the tables on the West at his annual end-of-the-year news conference Thursday, blaming the U.S. and its allies for soaring tensions over Ukraine and suggesting that “the ball is in their court” to respond to Moscow’s demands.
Putin said it was up to the U.S. and NATO to swiftly provide the security guarantees Moscow demanded last week, although he insisted he doesn’t want an armed conflict.
“The ball is in their court,” Putin told more than 500 Russian and foreign reporters at the marathon event. “They need to respond to us with something.”
Russia has massed 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, prompting fears of an invasion as early as next month, but it has repeatedly denied that it has any plans to attack its neighbor.
Putin sounded optimistic about the response to the security demands the Kremlin issued last week, which called for NATO to halt its eastward expansion, as well as for legally binding security guarantees that certain offensive weapons won’t be deployed to Russia’s neighboring countries.
He said Washington appeared ready to begin negotiations over its proposals early next year in Geneva, although it is unlikely that the U.S. and its allies will give the guarantees he wants.
Moscow wants unconditional guarantees of its security now and in the future, and it won’t accept the expansion of NATO eastward to include Ukraine, he said.
Offering an aggressively Russian view of history to back up his security concerns, Putin said Ukraine was “created” by Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. He also accused NATO of having “fooled” Russia with five waves of expansion since the Cold War and scorned the U.S. for inching closer to Russia’s “doorstep,” adding that it sometimes seems Moscow and the West live in “different worlds.”
“You are demanding guarantees from me,” Putin said. “You should be giving guarantees. And immediately, now. ”
Biden administration officials are prepared to begin talks with Russia next month, although a date and a location haven’t been agreed on, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
The official said that Putin has raised areas of concern that the U.S. is willing to discuss but that other demands remain off the table, including any talk of borders’ being changed or moves that would infringe on the sovereignty of other countries.
“What we’ve said is that there are some issues that Russia has raised that we believe we can discuss and others that they know very well we will never agree to, as well as that we have our own concerns to raise,” the official said. “That is what diplomacy is, that’s what a negotiation is, and that’s what we plan to undertake.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who said this week that Washington was working with its European allies to address what he called…
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