Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the US and its allies have ignored Russia’s key security demands in the standoff with the West over Ukraine.
‘It’s already clear now … that fundamental Russian concerns were ignored,’ Putin said during a press conference Tuesday, according to a Reuters translation.
Putin warned, that in creating a threat to Russian security, Ukraine is putting a target on its back. He then argued that as a future NATO member, Ukraine could try to retake Crimea — the peninsula Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
‘Let’s imagine Ukraine is a NATO member and starts these military operations. Are we supposed to go to war with the NATO bloc?’ Putin said, according to Reuters. ‘Has anyone given that any thought? Apparently not.’
The nation is still studying the US and NATO’s response last week to Russian demands, Putin said.
Putin then noted that the West has ignored Russian security demands, which include barring Ukraine or other former Soviet nations to join NATO and rolling back NATO deployments to Eastern Europe.
His comments come after a phone call between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The pair spoke for 30 minutes, but made little progress during their first conversation since the US presented its written response to Russia’s demands last week.
The Kremlin issued the demands in December, but both the US and NATO rejected them as nonstarters.
During the call, Blinken and Lavrov discussed the US’s response to Russia’s demands, and in a news release from the State Department Blinken stressed Washington’s willingness to continue ‘a substantive exchange’ with Russia on mutual security concerns.
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