Russia has demanded guarantees that NATO will never admit the country and that the alliance will roll back troop deployments in other former Soviet bloc countries.
Tensions are soaring between Russia, Ukraine and the West. Here’s a brief overview of what’s happening.Russia warned Wednesday it would quickly take "retaliatory measures" if the U.S. and its allies reject its security demands and continue their "aggressive" policies, ratcheting up pressure on the West amid concerns that Moscow is planning to invade Ukraine.
Speaking to lawmakers Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he and other top officials will advise President Vladimir Putin on the next steps after receiving written replies from the United States to the demands. Those answers are expected this week — even though the U.S. and its allies have already made clear they will reject the top Russian demands.
Asked by lawmakers if Russia could expand military cooperation with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, Lavrov responded that Moscow has close ties with those countries. Earlier this month, Lavrov’s deputy pointedly refused to rule out the deployment of Russian military assets to Cuba and Venezuela — far closer to the U.S. than Ukraine — if Moscow’s security demands aren’t met.
As others have, he noted that causing alarm could be an end in itself. Russia, he said, hopes to destabilize Ukraine by "spreading panic, raising pressure on Ukraine’s financial system and launching cyberattacks." Several rounds of high-stakes diplomacy have failed to yield any breakthroughs in the standoff, but another attempt was going forward Wednesday.
In 2014, following the ouster of a Kremlin-friendly president in Kyiv, Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in the country’s eastern industrial heartland. Fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed rebels has killed over 14,000 people, and efforts to reach a settlement have stalled.In addition to the military moves, the U.S.
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