What next after West refuses to grant security guarantees to Moscow?

By Sergey Sayenko

Last week saw a real diplomatic marathon: on January 10, Russia and the United States had consultations on security guarantees, January 12 featured a meeting of the Nato-Russia Council, and Thursday witnessed an OSCE meeting in Vienna, which was more of a formal nature. Let's briefly focus on each of the sessions and talk about their outcomes.

At the January 10 Geneva consultations, deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry Sergei Ryabkov explained in detail to US delegation leader Wendy Sherman the essence of Russian proposals on security guarantees made to the United States and Nato in mid-December last year.

 Those include: Nato's non-expansion to the east and restrictions on the deployment of strike weapons next to the borders of Russia, including in Ukraine; the refusal to create bases in the territory of post-Soviet states, as well as the removal of American nuclear weapons from Europe.

The key issue is certainly the waiver of North Atlantic Alliance's eastwards expansion. As Sergei Ryabkov said after the talks in Geneva, the United States refused to give guarantees here and is only ready to discuss a number of bilateral problems and arms control.

Legal guarantees of non-expansion topped the agenda of the Russia-Nato Council meeting in Brussels, either. The Russian delegation was led by Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, who called the sides' negotiations sought-after but pointed to a number of major challenges, particularly the North Atlantic Alliance's growth fraught with broad risk. According to Grushko, problems between Russia and Nato are daunting, and Moscow sees no way to overcome them as yet.

By and large, no one expected that Russia's unprecedentedly harsh proposals would be accepted by the United States and its NATO allies. After all, one of the key ones was the demand to abandon the alliance's expansion to the east (it was about Ukraine, primarily), which virtually implied providing Moscow with a right to veto new countries' membership. Washington could hardly do this, even if desired, because this would not only entail total power demoralisation in Kiev, but also a revolt among the alliance's European members.

And not because the continental states do not need Ukraine's membership in NATO, but because the US agreement with Russia would be considered as disregard for the opinion of allies in the Old World, whose capitals are already dissatisfied with US behavior.

 Suffice it to recall that the European Union was really offended by Washington for failing to invite them to join the current negotiations in Geneva and Brussels. It said not all the European states are part of NATO, while European security concerns the entire continent.

Therefore, the outcome of negotiations on the key issue was predetermined: both First Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, following their meetings with Russian representatives, confirmed that Moscow won't be given any non-expansion promises (including Ukraine's membership).

At the same time, the parties seem to have agreed to pursue negotiations on the deployment of weapons and inspections, which, be it noted, may be debated till the cows come home.

 However, there is little point in such discussions, especially amid the unresolved fundamental issue. An emphatic "no" was received, which is yet to be confirmed in the official responses by Washington and Brussels to the Moscow-proposed draft treaties, expected in the next few days.

The question arises as to why whether negotiations in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna were necessary? Why did Moscow initiate the whole narrative about "security guarantees"? Many analysts are puzzling over the answer, although it is not that hard to plumb.

A month ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked for this straight up not in a hope to get concessions from the United States and Nato, but because time was ripe to open a new chapter in restructuring the global world order.

It should be noted that the West has been deliberately whipping up hysteria over Russia's "imminent attack on Ukraine" underway for the past few months. At the same time, no one was going to establish specific timelines for Kiev's admission to Nato: it is still very dangerous to instigate Moscow this clearly, and the Atlantic strategists do apprehend it. And they do apprehend the impossibility of maintaining control over Ukraine indefinitely, which makes it increasingly difficult to use it as leverage against Russia to contain our country.

Ukraine is too valuable an asset for the United States to come to terms with the idea of losing it inevitably, so it needs to postpone this as far as possible and convince Moscow that the West won't give up on it for a song.

How to convince? Nothing better was thought up than to raise the stakes as much as possible, to wind up the situation around the "threat of Russian invasion" and the "terrible price for it" as represented by punishing sanctions.

President Putin seized the initiative and made a counter move, saying that Russia has no more time to endure the Western onslaught to the east. It is us who loathe to wait, it is us who are unsatisfied with the status quo – we deem Ukraine's Nato membership uncertainty unprofitable and won't put up with it.

 Putin's proposal to the collective West to back off from Kiev was initially unacceptable, but it signified the emergence of a new reality, a certain change of pace.

Now it is no longer the West that demands Russia to abstain from attacking Ukraine – it is Moscow that says the Western-rules game is over. And from now on, Russia apparently intends to act having its own security interests at heart.

In turn, the US-led collective West will be forced to build its relations with Russia by new rules. And not only with Russia: new Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi is coming to Moscow on his first visit, and in early February Vladimir Putin will go to Beijing and attend the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics along with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

 Seemingly, these visits will become a kind of building phase for a new global security architecture. Global, not Russian. The US and its allies will have to take this into account.