Top Russian envoy says U.S. to reply on Moscow security demands next week

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the U.S. promised to deliver written responses next week to Russian demands for security guarantees as he dismissed Western “hysteria” over Ukraine and repeated that Moscow has no plans to attack its neighbor.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered a preliminary reply to Russia’s demands and sought clarification on some issues during their 90-minute meeting in Geneva on Friday, which went on as long as planned, Lavrov told reporters. The two sides agreed that negotiations should take place in a less emotional atmosphere, though he can’t say now whether talks are on the right path or not, Lavrov said.

“In the end, we concluded with an agreement that written responses to all our proposals will be submitted to us next week,” Lavrov said.

Blinken said he asked Russia to prove its intentions by pulling back troops deployed on Ukraine’s borders.

“We have heard Russian officials say that they have no intention of invading Ukraine. In fact, Mr. Lavrov repeated that to me today,” Blinken told reporters after the talks.

“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 by de-escalating, by bringing back — removing — those forces on Ukraine’s border,” he said.

The high-stakes meeting between the two top diplomats came 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. That would risk sparking potentially 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.

Blinken didn’t rule out a meeting between Biden and Putin.

“President Biden met here in Geneva with President Putin, he’s spoken to him on the phone or via videoconference on a number of occasions, and if we conclude (and) the Russians conclude that the best way to resolve things is through a further conversation between them, we’re certainly prepared to do that,” he told reporters.

Lavrov said it’s NATO that’s seeking to make Ukraine part of its zone of influence, while Russia isn’t threatening the Ukrainian people or seeking to dominate its neighbors.

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 rejected those demands.

“What NATO is now doing toward Ukraine clearly shows that NATO sees Ukraine as part of its sphere of influence,” Lavrov said.

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.

It 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.

Biden said he’s told Putin “very clearly” that Russia faces severe U.S. and European sanctions if an attack takes place.

Russia is continuing a military build-up, sending troops and armor to within a few kilometers 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 earlier this week.

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.