The United States intends to continue dialogue with Russia and is working on written responses on security guarantees, said Deputy State Department Secretary Victoria Nuland.
“We want to continue talking. We believe that this should be done on the basis of reciprocity, namely, they will express their grievances, but we also have our concerns,” she said in an interview with the Financial Times.
According to Nuland, the door is open for a diplomatic solution from the US side.
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized the day before, over the past thirty years the country “has accumulated a lot of understanding” that “nothing will work out on promises, on some kind of political incantations.”
Therefore, Moscow insists that guarantees of NATO non-expansion be fixed legally, and expects a clear response from Washington to Russia’s proposals.
At the beginning of the week, a series of consultations took place between Russia, the United States and NATO on security guarantees: on January 9-10, the issue was discussed in Geneva at meetings with the American side, on January 12 at a meeting of the Russia-NATO Council, and on January 13 at the OSCE site.
Lavrov said that the West promised to give written answers next week to Russian proposals for a treaty with the United States and an agreement with NATO. As the minister emphasized, Moscow needs a concrete answer to each article of the documents put forward – the further actions of the Russian side and the prospects for the resumption of negotiations will depend on this.
The Kremlin insists on ending the bloc’s military cooperation with the post-Soviet countries, refusing to create bases on their territory, limiting the deployment of strike weapons near the Russian border, removing American nuclear weapons from Europe and guaranteeing NATO’s non-expansion to the east.