US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met on Monday in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss possible solutions in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has been amassing for nearly two months. tens of thousands of soldiers. At the center of the talks, in which the Ukrainian government is not participating, however, there is not only Ukraine: and this is why the meetings in recent days are being followed closely by the international press.
Russia essentially demands that NATO, the military alliance of which the US is the informal leader, renounce Ukraine joining the organization and expanding its influence eastward, while the US wants Russia to withdraw. its own soldiers from the border and does not further threaten the security of Ukraine.
For now, neither side seems willing to give up and there is little room for compromise.
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The meeting between Sherman and Ryabkov officially began around 9 on Monday morning, but the two had already begun to argue the night before by meeting for dinner.
Diplomatic contacts between Russia and the United States had been going on for weeks anyway: at the beginning of December the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, met in Stockholm also in that case. without coming to anything. And even in that case, the topic at the center of the discussions was the approximately 114 thousand soldiers moved by the Russian government at the end of November to the border with eastern Ukraine, a territory disputed for some time between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatist militias.
The mass of Russian soldiers on the border with Ukraine had immediately aroused much concern, both in the Ukrainian government and in several Western governments: it was interpreted as aimed at taking control of only some areas, to destabilize the current government Ukrainian (increasingly hostile to Russia) or to test the opposition of the West with a show of force. Russia, for its part, has always denied wanting to invade Ukraine (it also reiterated on Monday) and claimed to have amassed troops at the border due to an alleged military threat from Ukraine, which had bought recently some US-made ground-to-ground rockets.
In mid-December, Russia had made public a series of requests to Western governments to ease the tensions in progress, essentially linked to the desire to maintain their influence in Ukraine, which in recent years has moved away from Russia, aligning itself more and more with the West. They are claims considered inadmissible by many Western governments and particularly the United States, and are the same requests that much of the meeting between Sherman and Ryabkov on Monday focused on.
In practice, Russia is especially asking that Ukraine never join NATO, the military alliance that was created to oppose the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has welcomed among its members numerous countries that were once part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and its expansion to the east has always been a major concern of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
We have been talking about Ukraine’s entry into NATO since 2008: with the Bucharest agreements NATO promised Ukraine that it would one day join the alliance. It has never happened and in all probability it will not happen in the short term: that of Bucharest was a promise vague, risky and uncomfortable first of all for the United States. However, Ukraine remains one of the largest recipients of American military aid in the world and the question of its relations and its proximity to the United States remains very contentious and worrying for Russia, which nevertheless wants to make sure that Ukraine does not get too close to the West.
At Monday’s meeting in Geneva, Russia returned to the issue, asking the United States to formally declare NATO’s renunciation of Ukraine, possibly at the organization’s next summit, which will be held in Madrid at the end of June.
For her part, Wendy Sherman, an American diplomat who has already managed difficult negotiations during the administrations of previous presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said that with these premises it is not possible to find an agreement: the United States and the countries of the European Union have long feared that giving up ground in Ukraine would legitimize Russia to continue the his campaign of influence to reach all the territories that were part of the Soviet Union, some of which are now part of the European Union.
The two positions are distant and irreconcilable both on the main issue at the center of the negotiations – that is, NATO’s formal renunciation of Ukraine – and on the timing of reaching an agreement: Sherman hinted that the United States is willing to take all the time it takes. serves to resolve the issue satisfactorily, perhaps with a compromise on both sides, while Ryabkov he said wanting to see results quickly.
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