Moscow. January 9th. INTERFAX - Moscow is not optimistic ahead of the upcoming talks with the United States in Geneva on security guarantees, expectations are realistic, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Interfax.
"Our expectations are realistic. Based on the signals that have been heard from Washington and Brussels in recent days, it would probably be naive to assume progress, especially rapid. This is, of course, an alarming moment, because we are tasked with negotiating dynamically, without pauses. Without giving the opportunity to colleagues from the United States and NATO to slow down all this, to plunge into endless discussions of the same subjects that have been dumped in the OSCE for years and decades, on the NRC site (this happened before 2019) and so on," the deputy minister said, speaking about Moscow's expectations from the upcoming talks in Geneva.
Responding to a remark whether this means that Russia, like the United States, has no optimism about upcoming contacts, Ryabkov said: "No, no, absolutely not."
"We need guarantees of non-expansion of NATO, and legal ones at that. We certainly need solutions to ensure that strike weapons capable of hitting targets on our territory do not appear near the Russian borders. We need to ensure the curtailment of destructive NATO activities that have been carried out for decades and have been increasing recently and return NATO to positions that are essentially equivalent to what happened and what took place in 1997, when the Russia-NATO founding act was signed, and so on," said a senior Russian diplomat.
