Vladimir Putin said the US and its Nato allies had ignored Russia’s main security concerns, but promised to continue talks with the west, in a call with Emmanuel Macron amid simmering tensions over possible war in Ukraine.
In his first public comments on US and Nato responses to Russian proposals to rewrite the post-cold war security architecture, Putin said Moscow’s concerns about the expansion of Nato and the deployment of strike weapons near its borders had not been taken into account, according to a Kremlin readout of the phone call with his French counterpart.
Macron told Putin that Russia had to respect the sovereignty of states, according to the Élysée. Putin agreed to continue talks, so there was a feeling that “things have moved”, a French presidency official said.
The Pentagon said that the Russian military buildup around Ukraine was unprecedented since the end of the cold war and, if unleashed, would cause “horrific casualties”. The US has called a UN security council meeting on Monday for Russia to explain its military operations.
The diplomatic manoeuvres came as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, suggested the White House was panicking about an imminent Russian attack.
More than 100,000 Russian troops have massed at the border with Ukraine, prompting the US president, Joe Biden, to tell Zelenskiy, on Thursday there was “a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February”.
Asked about the call, Zelenskiy said he did not consider the situation more tense than before. “There is a feeling abroad that there is war here. That’s not the case,” he said. “I am not saying an escalation is not possible … [but] we don’t need this panic.”
Europeans have taken a more cautious approach to predictions of a Russian attack than Washington. The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service said on Friday that Russia was not yet fixed on an invasion, although it was prepared. “I believe that the decision to attack has not yet been made,” Bruno Kahl told Reuters.
In Washington, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, agreed: “We don’t think final decisions have been made.”
However, Milley said the current buildup of Russian troops was greater “than anything we’ve seen in recent memory”.
“Given the type of forces that are arrayed – the ground manoeuvre forces, the artillery, the ballistic missiles, the air forces, all of it packaged together – if that was unleashed on Ukraine, it would be significant. Very significant,” the general said. He added that such an operation would lead to heavy casualties, especially in urban areas.
“It would be horrific. It would be terrible,” Milley said. “And it’s not necessary.”
In a call with Macron lasting longer than an hour, Putin said the US and Nato had not taken into account Moscow’s “fundamental concerns” about the expansion of Nato and deployment of strike missiles near the Russian border.
Washington and European capitals rejected Russia’s demands to veto Ukraine’s Nato membership, but set out proposals on other ways to improve security on the continent in the unpublished documents.
“The key question was ignored,” Putin was reported to have said, according to the Kremlin statement. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and Russia’s relationship with Nato, the Russian president went on to say, were based on the principle that “no one should strengthen their security at the expense of other countries”.
The Russian leader also promised to “carefully study” the US and Nato written responses and continue a “Russian-French dialogue on the entire range of European security questions”.
Putin told the French leader Russia would continue talks in the so-called Normandy format that brings together representatives from France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia, following talks earlier this week between the quartet of countries.
Putin told Macron that the French president was “the only one who he could have such serious discussions with”, according to the French presidency source.
There was “disagreement, but agreement in the necessity for dialogue and that the Europeans and France are part of the ongoing dialogue”, said the French official. “Dialogue is difficult and there were no solutions from this call.”
The French president has long called for dialogue with Russia, sometimes angering other EU member states that have preferred a more distanced approach.
EU divisions rose to the surface after Latvia’s defence minister, Artis Pabriks, launched a no-holds-barred attack on the German government for what he called its “immoral” refusal to allow Estonia to ship guns of German origin to Ukraine. In an interview with the FT, Pabriks said: “If a person is walking in a dark alley and somebody is being beaten up and I’m saying, ‘Once you’re beaten up I’ll call an ambulance,’ it’s not proper.”
His comments attracted scathing criticism from the veteran German Green MEP Reinhard Bütikofer. “That’s the way to go, Latvia! Let’s turn Nato and the EU into a circular firing squad. That will teach [Vladimir] Putin and Xi [Jinping] a lesson. Right?” he wrote on Twitter, clarifying it was a “sarcasm tweet”.
Germany has ruled out shipping weapons abroad, citing its own past, a stance upheld by the foreign minister and Green party co-leader, Annalena Baerbock, on Thursday.
Meanwhile, EU officials say there has been an increase in pro-Kremlin disinformation since last autumn. “The last week of November is give or take the time when we started seeing again – as was the case in spring last year – intensified rhetoric and more aggressive rhetoric,” an EU official said.
Pro-Kremlin outlets, which EU sources describe as “machines of content” have made numerous claims, depicting Ukraine as a tool or toy of the west. Some of the more lurid stories have claimed the Ukrainian government is running a campaign of terror equivalent to Nazi rule, or that western governments are plotting a “false flag” chemical attack on the Donbas region of Ukraine.
A second EU official said sometimes the strategy appeared to be to “throw mud at the wall and see what sticks”. Other times it was “outright false stories, sometimes narratives with a grain of truth, sometimes decontextualised issues … But the important thing is this is a clearly coordinated, connected – and from our perspective – intentional use of these elements.”
Many of the stories emanate from comments or interviews with Russian officials, such as the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova. Outlets include websites and news agencies, such as Sputnik and Ria-Novosti, which have published these stories in several EU languages including Polish, Lithuanian and Spanish.
Separately, Brussels and Washington pledged to work together on energy security, as questions mount about the fate of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting Russia with Germany, which Berlin has said would be part of any sanctions package if Moscow ordered an invasion.
In a joint statement, Biden and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said they were working together on “continued, sufficient, and timely supply of natural gas to the EU from diverse sources across the globe to avoid supply shocks, including those that could result from a further Russian invasion of Ukraine”.
The US is already the biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas to the EU. “As we are preparing for sanctions, we are also preparing for possible counter-sanctions and our perception is that the energy field is one to look very carefully at,” a senior EU official told reporters.
On Friday, Russia again rejected claims it was seeking conflict. “If it depends on Russia, then there will be no war. We don’t want wars. But we also won’t allow our interests to be rudely trampled, to be ignored,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told Russian radio stations.
While western capitals are increasingly alarmed about the drift to war, Ukraine’s government has sought to play down the threat. The Ukrainian defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said on Friday that the total number of Russian troops near the border –was about 130,000, a number comparable to Moscow’s military buildup in spring 2021, when it eventually pulled its forces back after massive military exercises.
“We haven’t observed any events or actions of military character that significantly differ from what was going on last spring,” with the exception of the deployment to Belarus, Reznikov said.
Ukraine is still embroiled in a war with Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country that has claimed 14,000 lives.