KYIV -- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Russia faces “massive consequences” if it chooses “the path of aggression” with Ukraine as he called on Moscow to engage in diplomacy to end a crisis building along the Ukraine border.
In an interview with RFE/RL on January 27, Blinken also said that the United States still did not know what the Kremlin endgame was for Ukraine, and for its demands to rewrite Europe’s existing security structure.
“I maintain that the only person who can tell you what the Kremlin endgame is is President Putin. I don't think anyone else knows. And he may not even know this point because what he's done in the past, and what I believe animates the way he approaches things, is to create as many options as possible. And they run the gamut,” Blinken said in the interview.
Blinken spoke one day after the United States formally presented its written response to Russia’s ultimatums on security guarantees, released last month in the form of two draft treaties.
The Russian demands have been accompanied by the deployment of more than 100,000 Russian troops to regions near Ukraine’s borders, along with some of Russia’s most sophisticated military hardware.
The two documents amount to a wholesale restructuring of Europe’s security structure, calling for a moratorium on NATO expansion into former Soviet republics like Georgia and Ukraine, and a pullback of troops and weaponry in Eastern Europe to locations before NATO made its first major post-Cold War expansion in 1999.
