French President Emmanuel Macron is pursuing a poisoned peace plan, say critics in Europe, who fear the outcome of his talks this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin could be to strengthen Moscow’s hand in the crisis over Ukraine.
Top Russian commanders arrived in neighboring Belarus on Wednesday, set to oversee 30,000 Russian troops as they train for 10 days with the Belarusian military in the latest show of Moscow’s force along the Ukrainian border.
Russia has moved two battalions of S-400 surface-to-air missile systems and numerous fighter jets into Belarus for the exercises, with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian armed forces’ General Staff, in command of the drills that start on Thursday.
Shortly after the conclusion of the Russian-Belarusian strategic Zapad-2021 exercise, open-source analysts, corroborated by U.S. intelligence findings, began reporting a new build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. Though most tracking concentrates on the movement of Russian Ground Forces equipment, the Russian Navy has also been moving, albeit at a smaller scale.
Although the response in Western capitals to Russia’s aggressive military posturing on its border with Ukraine has been couched in clear diplomacy-first terms, military contingency planning has stepped up a notch in recent weeks. The intent of these moves, at least judging from the rhetoric of U.S. and NATO leaders as well as respected commentators, is to strengthen deterrence.
In a January 28 interview with the Russian media about the Ukraine crisis, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said, “if it depends on the Russian Federation, there will not be a war.” He also suggested that there were “kernels of rationality” in the formal responses to Russia’s demands that the United States and NATO had delivered a few days earlier. To some Western commentators, Lavrov’s comments were a hopeful sign that the Kremlin had achieved its intermediate aims and might be shifting course. According to this analysis, Russian President Vladimir Putin had the West exactly where he wanted it: by moving more than a hundred thousand troops to the Ukrainian border and issuing an ultimatum, he had forced the United States and NATO to enter into a dialogue with Moscow. All along, then, the Russian government had been acting with calculated brinkmanship, pursuing an approach that has left the United States and its NATO allies with few choices other than to negotiate on an equal footing.
U.S. troops could be used to help evacuate American citizens from Ukraine should Russia invade the country, chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday.
Kirby’s comments came as roughly 850 troops with the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., arrived in Poland in response to more than 100,000 Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders. Another 850 troops with 82nd Airborne are expected to join them in the coming days.
Strykers and combat support vehicles lined up at the Army airfield Wednesday as about 1,000 American troops prepared to head to Romania for an open-ended deployment meant to reassure allies worried about Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine.
The Vilseck-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment soldiers will remain in Romania to shore up NATO’s eastern flank as long as the mission requires, said Col. Joe Ewers, the regiment’s commander.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday there is an opportunity for further negotiations to de-escalate the crisis on the Ukraine-Russian border, after talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Kyiv.
“Our desire for the following weeks and months is for the situation to stabilize and for us to be able to re-engage through new mechanisms of guarantees, a sustainable de-escalation,” Macron said Tuesday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday afternoon, stressing the further deepening of “back-to-back” strategic coordination in upholding international fairness and justice and adhering to the four consensuses in supporting each other’s sovereignty, security and development interests to better tackle external interference and regional threats, as they exchanged views on a series of major issues regarding global strategic security and stability.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have called on the West to “abandon the ideologized approaches of the Cold War” as the two leaders showed their deepening “no limits” relationship amid a standoff between Moscow and the West over Ukraine.