Few if any diplomatic observers expect a quick deal to resolve the crisis this week, and the opposite – a complete breakdown – is possible. It should quickly become apparent whether Russia is interested in negotiating over its proposals or whether they were designed to be rejected, creating a pretext for a war that Putin has already decided on.
France’s European affairs minister, Clément Beaune, complained on Sunday that the EU was being excluded from the talks, an omission that he said played into Putin’s hands by dividing the west. “Europeans shouldn’t be absent from the negotiation table,” he told the CNEWS TV network. The OSCE talks are the only negotiations in which Ukraine will take part, though its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, announced a parallel bilateral diplomatic initiative directly with Moscow last month.
“This week’s diplomacy is critical. From a certain moment it was clear that the west would not say an outright no to Moscow’s proposal because too much was at stake. The question was, how far Washington and Europeans are ready to go with the talks,” said Andrey Baklitskiy, a senior research fellow at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
“Russia has said it feels threatened by the prospect of offensive missile systems being placed in Ukraine. As President Biden told President Putin, the United States has no intention of doing that. So, this is one area where we may be able to reach an understanding if Russia is willing to make a reciprocal commitment,” the senior US administration official said.
I can clearly remember the US not being very happy about countries near them choosing the old Commie Russia over the US. And they most definitely got involved in overthrowing the Governments of those countries
This is awful to call Russian aggression 'Ukrainian crisis' after 7 years of conflict and 14 000 of deaths.
Whoooaaa I'll bet Russia's really scared about these possible new sanctions...gee how much of a deterrent were those Crimea sanctions
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