MOSCOW, January 11. /TASS/. The US focused on bilateral issues in the security talks with Russia in Geneva, while leaving some of the thorniest security issues for the meeting between NATO and Russia, a researcher said on Tuesday.
The US "delegated the hardest and potentially the thorniest issues to the Russia-NATO Council that’s due to take place tomorrow," Russian International Affairs Council Director General Andrey Kortunov told TASS. "The US side consistently said they couldn’t discuss Ukraine issues without Ukraine, and NATO issues without NATO."
The results of the bilateral talks showed the countries could make some progress about the deployment of US short and medium-range missiles in Europe or some other bilateral arms control issues, the researcher said.
"But it’s clear that the main talks about Russia-NATO relations will take place tomorrow," he said.
The sides in the coming talks will test their flexibility after the hardline statements that preceded the negotiations, Kortunov said. He said while NATO would decline to give legally binding guarantees to Moscow that it won’t expand eastward, the bloc is also unlikely to proceed with such expansion in the next few years.
"That could potentially be formalized as a moratorium on the geographic expansion of the North Atlantic alliance to the east," Kortunov said. The extent of NATO’s cooperation with Ukraine could also become a subject for the talks, he said.
"But it’s hard to say yet whether it’ll be sufficient for Russia and could be a foundation for a compromise," he said.
Russia and the US held talks in Geneva dedicated to security guarantees on January 10. A Russia-NATO Council meeting to discuss Moscow’s concerns about European security is scheduled in Brussels for January 12, and the OSCE Permanent Council meeting in Vienna is planned for January 13.