MOSCOW — Western leaders said Tuesday they
were seeing positive signs that Russia was looking to ease tensions over
Ukraine, after Moscow announced it was pulling back some of the troops deployed
on its neighbor’s borders.
اضافة اعلان
In the first
announced withdrawal from among more than 100,000 troops
Russia amassed on the
Ukrainian border, the defense ministry in Moscow said some soldiers and
hardware were returning to bases at the end of planned exercises.
Western leaders had accused Moscow of positioning
the troops in advance of a possible invasion of pro-Western Ukraine, warning
that any attack would be met with severe economic sanctions.
After a meeting Tuesday with German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin said Russia “of course” did not want
war, and was willing to look for solutions with the West.
“We are ready to
work further together. We are ready to go down the negotiations track,” Putin
told a joint press conference with Scholz, confirming a “partial pullback of
troops”.
The German leader joined others in the West in
expressing hope that steps were being taken towards de-escalation in the
crisis.
“That we are now
hearing that some troops are being withdrawn is in any case a good sign,”
Scholz said.
“For Europeans it is clear that lasting security
cannot be achieved against Russia but only with Russia.”
‘Reason for hope’
Moscow released few details
about the troop withdrawal and there was no immediate outside confirmation.
NATO chief Jens
Stoltenberg said in Brussels there was not yet “any sign of de-escalation on
the ground” but that there were “grounds for cautious optimism”.
A French government spokesman said it was a
“positive signal” if Russian forces were indeed withdrawing, while Germany’s
Foreign Minister
Annalena Baerbock said “every real step of de-escalation would
be a reason for hope”.
British Prime Minister
Boris Johnson said there were
“signs of a diplomatic opening” with Russia, but that intelligence on a
possible invasion was “still not encouraging”.
The crisis — the
worst between Russia and the West since the Cold War ended — reached a peak
this week, with US officials warning that a full-scale invasion, including an
assault on Kyiv, was possible within days.
Washington took the dramatic step on Monday of
relocating its embassy in Kyiv to the western city of Lviv, after previously
urging
US citizens to leave Ukraine.
The Russian defense ministry announced the partial
withdrawal on Tuesday morning, saying some forces deployed near Ukraine had
finished their exercises and were packing up to leave.
“Units of the southern and western military
districts, having completed their tasks, have already begun loading onto rail
and road transport and today they will begin moving to their military
garrisons,” the ministry’s chief spokesman, Igor Konashenkov, said in a
statement.
It was not immediately clear how many units were
involved and what impact the withdrawals would have on the overall number of
troops surrounding Ukraine.
Konashenkov said
“large-scale” Russian military drills were continuing in many areas, including
joint exercises in Belarus and naval exercises in the
Black Sea and elsewhere.
Kremlin spokesman
Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the pullback was the “usual process” after
military exercises and blamed the West for the crisis.
“This is nothing
but a totally unprecedented campaign to provoke tensions,” he said, calling
decisions to move embassies to western Ukraine “ostentatious hysteria”.
‘Believe what you see’
Ukraine said deterrence
efforts against Russia appeared to be working but that it would watch to see if
any Russian withdrawal was real.
“We have a rule:
don’t believe what you hear, believe what you see. When we see a withdrawal, we
will believe in a de-escalation,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters.
In a separate move likely to anger Kyiv, Russian
lawmakers on Tuesday voted to urge Putin to recognize two breakaway regions in
eastern Ukraine as “sovereign and independent states”.
This would allow Russia to abandon the
Minsk agreements peace plan for eastern Ukraine and potentially move in Russian
troops — giving Putin a strong hand to play in any future negotiations with
Kyiv.
The EU “strongly”
condemned the move, saying it would violate the Minsk agreements that Moscow
had signed up to.
Russia has
repeatedly blamed the Ukraine crisis on the West, saying the US and Western
Europe are ignoring Russia’s legitimate security concerns.
The Kremlin insists
NATO must give assurances Ukraine will never be admitted as a member and roll
back its presence in several eastern European and ex-Soviet countries.
Russia already controls
the
Crimean Peninsula that it seized from Ukraine in 2014 and supports
separatist forces who have taken control of parts of Eastern Ukraine, in a
conflict that has claimed more than 14,000 lives.
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