TA’QALI, Malta: Russia on Thursday accused the West of failing to heed the Kremlin’s warnings over the dangers of dispatching troops to support Ukraine.
Speculation over possible Western deployments, potentially as a peacekeeping force in the event of a ceasefire, has mounted amid an escalation in the nearlyr three-year war.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday that the talk of boots on the ground showed the West was not listening to Moscow’s concerns.
“All these fantasies are only exacerbating the situation, and show that the people who hold such ideas, prefer not to hear the very clear warnings that President Putin has repeatedly given,” he told reporters.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said last month that there were no “red lines” when it came to Paris’s support for Ukraine.
Asked whether this included a French troop deployment, he said: “We do not discard any option.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Wednesday it was too early and “inappropriate” to discuss whether Berlin would in future send troops to a possible peacekeeping force in Ukraine.
Lavrov was speaking after an OSCE summit in Malta, his first trip to an EU country since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Russia, US Army Chiefs Hold Rare Call
Meanwhile, the Russian and US army chiefs held a rare phone call last week amid an escalation on the battlefield in Ukraine, officials from both sides said Thursday.
Direct contact between Moscow and Washington has almost ceased to exist amid the Ukraine war, and the Kremlin has said it considers the United States a direct participant in the conflict.
The call, between Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov and the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Brown, occurred on November 27 and was held at the request of the Russian side, both Moscow and Washington said.
“The leaders discussed a number of global and regional security issues including the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Brown’s spokesman told AFP.
It was the first call between the pair since Brown took over the role in October 2023.
The Russian defence ministry said Gerasimov had informed Brown about Russian military drills in the eastern Mediterranean.
“On November 27 of this year, a phone conversation took place between Russian Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov and US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Brown at the initiative of the Russian side,” the defence ministry said as reported by Sputnik news agency.
The US was informed about military exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean that involved life fire drills and launches of precision missiles, the ministry added.
“This information has been shared in order to prevent possible incidents due to the presence of US and NATO ships in the vicinity of the area of the Russian exercise,” the statement read.
The US currently has two destroyers operating in the Mediterranean Sea, the USS Bulkeley and the USS Arleigh Burke, according to a spokesman for the Navy.
It did not mention Ukraine or any other topic.
Citing a US military spokesperson, the New York Times reported that the two sides discussed Russia’s new Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile.
Brown also expressed US concern over the deployment of North Korean troops to support Russia’s army on the battlefield, CNN reported.
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Tensions between Russia and the United States have escalated since Donald Trump won the presidential election in November.
The outgoing Joe Biden administration has given Kyiv the green light to fire US-supplied ATACMS missiles on Russian territory, while Russia lowered its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
In response to Kyiv striking Russian border regions with Western weapons, Russia said it “test fired” a never-before-seen missile in a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
The US and Russia maintain deconfliction lines in certain combat zones to avoid unintentional encounters when the two militaries operate near each other.
That line has been used recently in the Middle East to prevent any friction between US and Russian forces operating in Syria, the Pentagon said.
But since the start of the war in Ukraine nearly three years ago, the US and Russian military chiefs have rarely spoken, despite repeated outreach efforts by the US as the war began.
The New York Times reported that it is unclear why Gerasimov wanted to keep the phone call with Brown public.
Gerasimov’s last contact with the US Army chief of staff was in October 2022, when he had a telephone conversation with Brown’s predecessor, General Mark Milley.
