Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that his government was studying the responses from the United States and NATO to his security demands related to Ukraine but that it was clear the Kremlin’s main complaints “had been ignored.”
For weeks, Putin had said little publicly about the crisis sparked by Russia’s buildup of tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine’s borders, which has raised fears of a possible invasion.
But speaking at a Tuesday news conference following a five-hour meeting in Moscow with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Putin said: “It is already clear — I informed the Prime Minister about this — that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored. We did not see an adequate consideration of our three key requirements.”
Putin added that Russia had not seen “adequate consideration of our three key demands regarding NATO expansion, the renunciation of the deployment of strike weapons systems near Russian borders, and the return of the [NATO] bloc’s military infrastructure in Europe to the state of 1997, when the Russia-NATO founding act was signed.”
The US and NATO have said Putin’s demands — which include a promise to never expand eastward to countries including Ukraine — violate NATO’s open-door policy and are non-starters in negotiations.
