Russia has repeated its demands over Ukraine in long talks in Switzerland with the US, but Washington has signalled they cannot be discussed, British-Canadian news agency Reuters reports.
The talks took place in Geneva on Monday, January 11, after US pointed to Russia amassing around 100 000 military personnel near its border with Ukraine and possible Russian invasion into Ukraine this winter. High-ranking diplomats of the US and Russia spoke for over seven hours.
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«Unfortunately, we have a great disparity in our principled approaches to this. The U.S. and Russia in some ways have opposite views on what needs to be done,» Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov noted to journalists after the talks. Ryabkov reiterated a set of wild demands, among them a ban on further NATO expansion and an end to the activity of the military alliance in the central and eastern European countries that joined after 1997.
«We were firm … in pushing back on security proposals that are simply non-starters to the United States,» U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told in a separate telephone briefing after nearly eight hours of talks with Ryabkov. Nonetheless, the US diplomat pointed to the possibility of mutual compromises, saying Washington was open to discussing missile deployments in Europe as well as setting limits on the size and scope of military exercises, Reuters reports.
After Russia-US defence talks, sides speak of differing positions
