A day after Russia seemed to swerve away from a military confrontation with Ukraine, Western leaders said Wednesday that they were still looking for proof that President Vladimir Putin was open to a diplomatic resolution and was pulling back troops from Ukraine’s borders.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States had seen no evidence of a significant Russian military withdrawal, while the Ukrainian government continued to search for a peaceful way to avert an invasion by Moscow. A senior official said President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was considering holding a referendum that could keep his country from joining NATO, fulfilling one of Putin’s key demands.
The prospects for such a vote were uncertain and ambiguous, and many Ukrainians were likely to bitterly oppose any sign of concessions to Russia, but the fact that it was being floated at all showed that Putin’s buildup of forces near Ukraine’s borders could enable him to achieve his objectives without launching a full-scale invasion.
Still, U.S. and NATO officials said that the threat of an invasion had not passed.
“Unfortunately there’s a difference between what Russia says and what it does,” Blinken said in an interview with ABC News. “And what we’re seeing is no meaningful pullback. On the contrary, we continue to see forces — especially forces that would be in the vanguard of any renewed aggression against Ukraine — continuing to be at the border, to mass at the border.”
The NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, echoed the U.S. assessment, saying that Russia remains capable “of a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine without any warning time.”
Stoltenberg said that in the past Russia has moved troops while leaving weaponry in place.
“So what we need to see is a real withdrawal of forces, which is lasting and real, and not that they move troops around,” he said.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, dismissed NATO’s assessment on troop levels, saying that the alliance had not made “a sober evaluation” of the situation.
Russia’s Defense Ministry announced more troop withdrawals, saying that a train loaded with Russian tanks, armoured vehicles and howitzers left Crimea and would return to bases after concluding military exercises. A video from the ministry showed a train loaded with armoured vehicles crossing into mainland Russia from Crimea, travelling across a vast bridge built to link Crimea and Russia after it annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Ruslan Leviev, a researcher who follows Russian troop movements, said that the military equipment that left Crimea could be redeployed at bases near Ukraine’s east.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said that U.S. analysts say that more than 150,000 Russian troops near the Ukrainian border “remain very much in a threatening position.” But he emphasized that the United States would continue to pursue “a diplomatic resolution.”
At the centre of the diplomatic discussions is the suggestion that Ukraine might drop its ambition to join the NATO alliance. A Ukrainian vice prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said in a Ukrainian television interview that Zelenskyy was considering putting the question of whether to join NATO membership to a vote of the Ukrainian people.
“The president assumes there is such a possibility, if there are no other options or tools,” she said in the interview.
Her comments came after several rounds of European-led shuttle diplomacy this month in which Zelenskyy, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France have all spoken publicly of Ukraine finding some form of neutrality between Russia and NATO as a means to avoid war.
In a sign of possible U.S. support for this approach, Wendy R. Sherman, the deputy secretary of state who led negotiations with Moscow last month, said in an interview published Wednesday that America would support Ukraine in any decision it took on its own. In earlier rounds of talks, Sherman had refused to bend to Russian demands that the United States rule out NATO membership for Ukraine.
“This is not a decision for the U.S. side,” Sherman told Yevropaiska Pravda, a Ukrainian news outlet. “This decision remains with the Ukrainian people, what they want, where they see their future. This is your choice.”
