MOSCOW, May 17. /TASS/. The security guarantees discussed between the West and Russia in December 2021 are no longer applicable given today's environment, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in an interview with TASS.
"I think that working on shaping some security guarantees as the agreements talked about in 2021 is currently obsolete. Our scale of priorities, including in the field of ensuring our own security and shaping a more stable framework for these efforts, has completely changed," the senior diplomat said.
"What is going on in the Western direction is, currently, above all, the task for the military and security forces," he noted. "I would say that along these lines, diplomacy is working in the mode of crisis control and preventing the situation from unfolding into a really large-scale conflict," Ryabkov added.
On December 17, 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry released draft agreements on the security guarantees that Moscow expects to receive from Washington and NATO. Russian-US consultations on these issues were held on January 10, 2022 in Geneva. On January 12, a session of the Russia-NATO Council was held in Brussels and on January 13, these initiatives were discussed at a meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna.
On January 26, 2022, the US and NATO handed over written responses to Russia on Moscow’s security guarantees that it was demanding from Washington and Brussels. The American side requested that the documents not be made public, although US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg enumerated their basic provisions. According to these statements, the West did not make any concessions to Russia considered to be critical.