New Delhi: A day ahead of a series of talks with the US, Russia has dug in on both the Ukrainian and Kazakhstan issues.
Antony Blinken, Secretary of state, US Russia mounting pressure Russia seeks to challenge the international system itself and to unravel our trans-Atlantic alliance, erode our unity, pressure democracies into failure.
While Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov will talk with his US counterpart Wendy Sherman in Geneva on Monday, Russian President Valdimir Putin will participate in an online meeting of the six-member CSTO (Collective Security Council), which has sent its troops into Kazakhstan.
“The meeting will discuss the situation in Kazakhstan and measures to normalise it,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
In India, too, the Russian embassy went on the offensive after a section of the media interviewed Ukrainian diplomats. “It should be clearly understood that Russia does not threaten anyone. By trying to convince the opposite to the international community, including the Indian audience, the Kiev regime is simply blame shifting, seeking to veil its own crimes multiplied by inability to exercise a balanced and inclusive domestic and foreign policy,” it said.
Rybakov said Russia would make no concessions at Geneva due to “the constant pressure and threats coming from the Western side” and said any step back by Moscow would “mean going against our own interests, our security interests”.
“In a nutshell, we need legal guarantees that NATO will not expand further; elimination of everything that the alliance has created and all sorts of misconceptions about Russian policy since 1997,” Ryabkov told Sputnik news agency while adding that Moscow’s main goal is to discuss the non-expansion of NATO and the non-deployment of offensive weapons near Russia’s borders.
The Russia-US talks are being held in three formats. The first is the Geneva meeting on Monday which will be followed by a Russia-NATO Council meeting on Wednesday and Russia-OSCE consultations the next day.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said Russia was posing “an immediate challenge” to stability in the region but offered to resolve the issues via diplomacy if Moscow is serious about de-escalating tensions.
Russia wants the US to commit to not setting up military bases in former Soviet republics that are not NATO members and not expand the alliance any further to its borders.