Putin says U.S., NATO disregarded Russia's security demands

Russian Ambassador to the U.N. VasilyNebenzya countered by accusing the United States of "provoking" the conflict.

by Anwar A. Khan

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the West has ignored Moscow's key security requests amid tensions over Ukraine's possible membership in NATO.

His comments came during a news conference following a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the Kremlin.

Putin said he was reviewing the United States and NATO's written responses to the security demands, which Moscow received.

"It is already clear ... that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored," he said, according to Russia's state-run Tass news agency.

Putin said the West didn't provide adequate responses to Russia's three top concerns -- that Ukraine doesn't join NATO, there be no deployment of strike weapons near Russia's borders and returning NATO military deployment to 1997 positions.

Russia issued these security requests in December last.

"Ignoring our concerns, the U.S. and NATO generally refer to the right of the states to freely choose ways to ensure their security. But this is not just about giving somebody the right to freely choose how to ensure their security," he said.

"The second inalienable part says that no one should be allowed to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states.

Officials said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were expected to speak with a goal of heading off further military escalation near Russia's border with Ukraine, but that didn’t betide.

Russia closes diplomatic mission to NATO over spying accusations. "We continue to engage in non-stop diplomacy and to de-escalate tensions and attempt like the devil to improve security for our allies and partners and for all of Europe, for that matter," Putin said, but because of US, it didn’t happen.

Blinken and Lavrov met in person on January 21 last in Geneva with the same goal. No breakthroughs came in Switzerland, but both sides agreed to keep talking, but it didn’t progress because of the Uncle Sam’ temerity.

At Security Council meeting, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned Moscow against military intervention -- and emphasized that the United States and Western allies want a "path of peace" and dialogue.

Russian Ambassador to the U.N. VasilyNebenzya countered by accusing the United States of "provoking" the conflict. 

The Russian government said Monday that it's closing its military liaison mission to NATO and recalled staffers to Moscow, in retaliation to the alliance expelling several Russians last week and accusing them of espionage.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov made the announcement during a news conference in Moscow.

"In response to NATO's actions, we are suspending the activity of the NATO military liaison mission in Moscow and will recall the accreditation of its staff," Lavrov said, according to state-run TASS.

"If NATO has some urgent matters, it may contact our ambassador in Belgium on these issues."

NATO said that it cut the staff of the Russian mission from 20 to 10, revoking accreditation for eight Russian diplomats and eliminating two vacant positions.

NATO said it made the move because it believed the diplomatic members were undeclared Russian spies.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Georgia's prime minister and defense minister during a tour to "reassure" allies and partners of "America's commitment to their sovereignty in the face of Russian aggression."

Austin will also visit Ukraine and Romania before a stop at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

U.S. officials say they have received a written response from Russia about questions they posed after the last meeting between Blinken and Lavrov. The White House didn't detail the answers, saying that it wouldn't be productive to negotiate in public.

The Kremlin, however, also denied that it had submitted a response to U.S. concerns. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told state-run news agency RIA Novosti that the response was still being prepared.

Many of the world’s foreign affairs pundit class and some in the Canadian contingent seem trapped in a time warp. Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, they tut-tutted about how the West and NATO should not have provoked Putin into threatening his invasion, by welcoming new members 25 years ago. Within days of the first attacks, they were already mumbling about the need to provide Putin with an “exit strategy”, and the importance of not “provoking” Putin further. As the body count mounted, they began to speculate about when the Russian oligarchs might push back on Putin. What nonsense. The only pushback he fears is from the siloviki, the security establishment. They may yet decide he is a liability to their control of the kleptocracy they govern.

This is not 1989. This is not the era when Helmut Kohl, George H.W. Bush, Brian Mulroney and many other world leaders were able to gently nudge the Russians away from confrontation. Putin is not Gorbachev. We are at the end of the quiet decades of Russian integration into the global community, with occasional wrist slaps for Putin’s earlier, smaller aggressions against neighbours.

There is no “exit strategy” for Putin, today. As there should not have been when he invaded first Georgia and then Crimea. As Churchill made clear to a similarly wobbly foreign policy elite in 1940, the dictator’s only exit strategy is defeat.

In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union jumped ahead of the United States' first strike capability in a big way. The latest version of the R-36 intercontinental ballistic missile (called SS-18 by NATO) could hit anywhere in the U.S. with at least 10 18-25 megaton nuclear warheads.

The new missile could destroy the Americans' LGM-30 Minuteman III missiles before they ever left their silos. As time went on, more advanced designs only increased its nuclear payload. Eventually, it carried more power than anything in the U.S. arsenal. From the moment its existence was uncovered, NATO forces nicknamed the weapon the "Satan" missile.

The second version, the R-36M, featured multiple reentry vehicles (the actual nuclear warheads), which could hit more than one target with one missile launch.

This was the age of mutually assured destruction, the military doctrine that both sides of a nuclear war would be destroyed in a nuclear exchange. If a nuclear war broke out, both sides would fire all their missiles. MIRV technology allowed for more targets and increased the odds of a first strike effectively wiping out the other side before it could retaliate.

The United States first developed MIRV-based missiles with the three-warhead Minuteman III in 1968, but the SS-18 "Satan" could carry eight to 10 more powerful warheads, with the explosive power to destroy American missiles inside protected silos. When the "Satan" system became fully operational in 1975, the U.S. worried it would no longer survive a Soviet first strike and began working on missiles with more and more warheads.

Inside the USSR, Soviet engineers and scientists kept making modifications for future iterations of the "Satan" ICBM. By the time the Soviet Union fell, it had gone through six different versions, each more powerful than the last. The sixth version of the SS-18 missile would be the most powerful nuclear weapon ever fielded by the Soviet Union.

By the time the USSR fell in 1991, Soviet-built SS-18 missiles could strike anywhere in the world.

Russia's newest weapon is the RS-28 Sarmat "Satan-2" missile, with 10 heavy reentry vehicles, each with enough payload to wipe out an area the size of Texas or France. It also features hypersonic glide vehicles to make it less detectable by U.S. or space-based sensor systems and could be immune to American missile defense systems.

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The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs