The top U.S. and Russian diplomats emerged from a 90-minute meeting in Geneva to discuss the standoff over Ukraine with little clear progress made but an agreement to keep talking.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. will soon send written responses to Russia addressing its concerns, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Western “hysteria” over Ukraine and repeated that Moscow has no plans to attack its neighbor.
“If Russia wants to begin to convince the world that it has no aggressive intent toward Ukraine, a very good place to start would be deescalating,” Blinken said Friday at the end of a three-day European trip. The two sides agreed that negotiations should take place in a less emotional atmosphere, though Lavrov said he can’t say now whether talks are on the right path.
The meeting appeared to buy some time for both sides to pursue diplomacy amid increasingly urgent warnings by U.S. President Joe Biden that Russia could be planning an imminent intervention in Ukraine after having massed around 100,000 troops near its border.
But the situation remains extremely tense.
U.S. officials are now weighing whether to evacuate family members of diplomats stationed in Ukraine, according to people familiar with the matter, in a precautionary move that signals the situation could deteriorate further.
Under the plan, non-essential staff would be able to leave voluntarily while family members would be ordered to return home. An announcement may come within days, according to the people, who asked not to be identified before a decision is reached.
While U.S.-Russia talks will continue, it’s still unclear what the U.S. could offer Russia that would address its demands about the future of NATO.
“What was agreed today which was that we will share with Russia a response to the concerns it’s raised, our own concerns, and put some ideas on the table for consideration,” Blinken said. “And then we plan to meet again after Russia has had an opportunity to look at that paper.”
The Blinken-Lavrov meeting comes after Biden and his aides spent much of Thursday seeking to clarify remarks the president made a day earlier suggesting the U.S. and Europe were divided over how to respond to a “minor incursion” into Ukraine.
As U.S. officials worked to reassure European allies on their resolve, Biden laid out his clearest line yet on what action would trigger serious punishment. “If any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” he said.
The U.S. and Europe are warning that further aggressive Russian moves could potentially start the worst conflict in Europe in decades. While Russia denies it plans an invasion, the U.S. and its European allies say President Vladimir Putin’s intentions remain unclear. And Russian officials say the West is the aggressor.
“What NATO is now doing toward Ukraine clearly shows that NATO sees Ukraine as part of its sphere of influence,” Lavrov said.
Calling it a “critical moment,” Blinken said at the start of their talks that the U.S. wanted to “test whether the path of diplomacy and dialogue remains open.” Lavrov said the talks would allow the U.S. “to come up with concrete answers to all our proposals and put forward your own counter-proposals if need be.”
Russia is demanding binding security guarantees that would bar Ukraine from ever joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and require the alliance to roll back its forces to positions they held in 1997, before central and eastern European nations joined NATO. The U.S. and its NATO allies have rejected those demands.
The meeting capped days of intense diplomacy by Blinken, who visited his Ukrainian counterpart in Kyiv and held talks in Berlin with U.K., German and French allies before traveling to Geneva.
Russia is continuing a military buildup, sending troops and armor to within a few miles of the Ukrainian border in neighboring Belarus for joint military drills that start Feb. 10. Two divisions of S-400 air-defense systems are also being dispatched to Belarus, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Friday, according to the Interfax news service.
Europe and the U.S. have been unable to hash out detailed responses to various scenarios that Russia might pursue in Ukraine, and options like sending NATO troops to the country aren’t on the table. The European Union has also shied away from discussing specific sanctions that could be imposed if Russia mounts an invasion.
Putin and Finnish President Sauli Niinisto held a “long and thorough” conversation on Friday on geopolitics, including Europe’s security and events in Ukraine, Niinisto’s office said in a statement.
Niinisto, who called Putin, spoke of “his grave concern over the situation and emphasized the necessity of upholding peace in Europe” and a need to find solutions through ongoing dialog was underscored in the conversation, his office said. Niinisto spoke with Biden on Jan. 18.
Meanwhile, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, said he plans consultations next week with the leaders of party factions in the State Duma on a draft appeal for Putin to recognize areas of eastern Ukraine seized by Kremlin-backed separatists in 2014 as independent states.
The appeal submitted by Communist Party lawmakers says recognition is “morally justified” and would enable Russia to give security guarantees to the separatist-held territories. Russia has already issued hundreds of thousands of passports to residents of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk peoples’ republics.
