Russia has demanded that NATO return to its 1997 borders at the talks with US envoys in Moscow. That is reported by the New York Times, citing a document from the Russian side, as relayed by the Kyiv Post on Saturday. President Vladimir Putin presented the demands on Thursday, 12 November, in the Kremlin – in some points word for word as in December 2021, two months before the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
According to the New York Times, the document is unsigned and serves only as an informal presentation of one side’s position. Accordingly, NATO is to withdraw troops from its eastern flank, including from Poland and the Baltic states. Also demanded are a ban on any further expansion of the alliance and on “any military activity” in Ukraine, in Eastern Europe, in the South Caucasus and in Central Asia.
Nuclear weapons, EU defence policy, arms supplies
Moscow further demands, according to the report, an end to nuclear sharing in NATO, that is, the stationing of US nuclear weapons for the protection of Europe. France and the United Kingdom are also to be barred from using their nuclear deterrents to protect European allies. All Western military aid to Ukraine – weapons, military equipment and armaments – would have to be stopped completely.
According to the document, Moscow would agree to Ukraine’s EU accession only if Kyiv remains excluded from the European Union’s common defence policy. Two people familiar with the talks told the New York Times that Russian negotiators had presented the Cold War and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact as a model for the security order in post-war Europe. At the same time, officials had hinted that Putin could continue to show “flexibility”.
According to a US official, the US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner countered the Russian representatives that much had changed since December 2021. The New York Times writes that the fact that the Russian starting position has remained almost unchanged after five years shows the scale of the difficulty of finding a compromise that would move Putin to end the war.
Warsaw warns, a US senator speaks of a “farce”
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on 12 November in Dublin that accepting the Russian conditions meant “a direct threat to Poland’s security”. They were obviously unacceptable not only for Ukraine but above all for Europe and for countries such as Poland, Tusk said according to the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda.
The chairman of the intelligence committee in the US Senate, Republican Tom Cotton, called the demand that NATO states withdraw their troops from their own borders absurd. “Putin has once again proved that he has no intention of seriously pursuing peace through negotiations. At this point, further talks are a farce,” Cotton wrote on X, as reported by Ukrainska Pravda. Putin would end the war only when he recognised that he could not win. “We must help Ukraine prove that to him.”
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) had already pointed out on 11 November that the Kremlin wanted to use the trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi to reshape the European security architecture – and thereby revive its 2021 demands. The demand at the time that no new weapons and military personnel be stationed in NATO states that joined after 1997 would, according to the ISW, amount to a Russian veto over NATO policy. The ISW also stresses that neither NATO nor Ukraine had taken significant steps towards Ukrainian accession between 2008 and 2022.
What follows the talks
According to the Kyiv Post, the consultations in the Kremlin were preceded by two days of trilateral negotiations between Ukraine, Russia and the US in Abu Dhabi on 10 and 11 November. European representatives were excluded from the core talks and instead held their own consultations with the Ukrainian and US delegations. The Ukrainian delegation was led by the head of the foreign intelligence service, Rustem Umierov, the Russian one by Putin’s adviser Vladimir Medinsky, as the news outlet NV reports.
Russian foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said on 12 November that Putin and US President Donald Trump wanted to continue the talks on a solution on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen on 18 and 19 November, together with a proposed trilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Bulgarian outlet fakti.bg, that Russia could speak about European participation only once their “true” intentions and their readiness to contribute to the peace process had been clarified. The ISW assesses the Russian stance as intended to limit Europe’s role both in ending the war and in future security guarantees for Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European heads of government have repeatedly rejected any peace settlement negotiated at the table without Kyiv and Europe. At the summit of the European Political Community in Dublin on 12 November, Zelensky also called on European partners to support plans for winter resilience for Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa and other cities hit by Russian attacks.
The editorial assessment: The Russian position is not a basis for negotiation but a reissue of the pre-war ultimatums. The fact that it lies on the table almost unchanged five years after the invasion shifts the dispute from the conditions of a ceasefire to the question of who will decide on Europe’s security in future. For Ukraine and its neighbours, including Germany as part of NATO’s eastern flank, this is therefore not only about territories but about the foundation of the European security order.
