Even as talks between Russia and US & its NATO allies over Ukraine have hit a dead-end, Poland’s foreign minister has warned that Europe might dragged into war if the tensions are not defused soon.
Without naming Russia in his address to envoys from the 57 members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Zbigniew Rau said that tensions in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova, have active or frozen conflicts where Kremlin is alleged to be a party.
“It seems that the risk of war in the OSCE area is now greater than ever before in the last 30 years,” Poland’s foreign minister Zbigniew Rau, who currently chairs the Vienna-based intergovernmental body, said on Thursday during the latest round of talks on Russia.
Rau reported no breakthrough at the Vienna meeting, which followed Russia-US talks in Geneva on Monday and a Russia-NATO conference in Brussels on Wednesday.
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Meanwhile, the White House claimed that the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine remained high with some 100,000 Russian troops deployed.
Michael Carpenter, US Ambassador to the OSCE, said the United States would make public within 24 hours intelligence suggesting that Russia might launch another invasion on Ukraine.
“The drumbeat of war is sounding loud, and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill,” Carpenter said after talks with Russia in Vienna.
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Russia, however, junked the reports that it is going to invade Ukraine.
“There is no reason to fear some kind of escalatory scenario,” Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei A Ryabkov told reporters after the meeting.
“The talks were difficult, long, very professional, deep, concrete, without attempts to gloss over some sharp edges,” Ryabkov said.
“We had the feeling that the American side took the Russian proposals very seriously and studied them deeply.”
(With inputs from agencies)
