R.At his annual press conference on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the first Western reactions to Russian demands for “security guarantees” to Washington and NATO were “overall rather positive”. Putin announced that initial talks should take place in Geneva, Switzerland, at the beginning of next year.
This was substantiated by a statement by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday that Russia and the United States would hold the first round of bilateral talks on “security guarantees” in January; Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor, and Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor to American President Joe Biden, had several talks on this. The representatives have already been named on both sides. Later, also in January, they want to negotiate the agreement demanded by NATO, Lavrov said.
“Brainwashing the population”
Putin has now reproached Ukraine and the West. One has the impression that Kiev is possibly preparing a military operation against the pro-Russian “People’s Republics” in Donbass and that Russia “is warned in advance: do not interfere, do not protect these people”, otherwise there will be “new sanctions”. Russia must be prepared, said Putin, recalling his article published in July that denies an independent Ukraine the right to exist. There is a possibility that the West intends to create an “anti-Russia” in Ukraine, with “brainwashing of the population” and “modern weapons”, under whose cover “radicals” are then sent to Donbass and the Ukrainian Crimea, which was annexed in 2014 should be.
He also accused the West of using Russians who “serve foreign interests” to try to make Russia fail. “You cannot defeat Russia, you can only bring it down from within,” is a centuries-old motto of the opponents. Russia is “too big” from their point of view, said Putin, and again accused the West of supporting terrorists in the North Caucasus in the 1990s.
With a view to Russia’s new attack on Ukraine, feared in the West and in Kiev, Putin said that Russia’s actions would depend on the country’s unconditional long-term security being guaranteed. These guarantees must be given “immediately, now”, because the Americans have advanced “to the threshold of our house”. He repeated the Moscow presentation that NATO had promised Russia that there would be no expansion to the east. This representation is contested by the Alliance and by the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, among others. Putin denied that Russia is threatening neighboring countries.