EU leaders reject Putin’s demand for NATO rollback

Russia is using renewed US-brokered Ukraine talks to bring back the sweeping demands on NATO that it made before its 2022 invasion. Moscow is pressing for the alliance to pull back from Eastern Europe as a condition for ending the war. After a roughly two-hour Kremlin meeting with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner on Thursday, Nov. 12, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said Vladimir Putin had reminded them of Moscow's 2021 proposals for NATO to roll back its deployments in Central and Eastern Europe, and that Russia would update them with "fresh considerations," AP reported.apnews.com

The New York Times obtained a document Russian officials circulated this week. It shows negotiators reviving the demand that NATO return its forces to their 1997 positions, sometimes in the same wording, which suggests Putin has changed little about his core goals after more than 20 months of Trump administration diplomacy, according to the Times.nytimes.com

Threats and territory

Putin told the envoys that any European troops sent to Ukraine after a ceasefire would be "absolutely unacceptable" and a legitimate target. "In other words, the war would resume immediately," he said, according to AP. He also said Russia's border under any deal would cover the four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed in 2022 but has never fully controlled. He rejected demilitarized buffer zones, saying "there is only one line of demarcation: the state border," Kyiv Post reported, citing the Institute for the Study of War. ISW concluded that "Putin remains unwilling to compromise."kyivpost.com+1

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a NATO pledge not to expand eastward must now be put in writing. He argued that earlier verbal assurances were followed by "five or six" rounds of enlargement, Censor.net reported.censor.net

The Abu Dhabi talks, the first direct Russia-Ukraine contact in nine months, produced a deal on a large prisoner swap and plans for another round that Europe is expected to join, AP said. Kushner said bringing Europe in would "allow us to address the broader postwar European security arrangements," AFP reported.apnews.com+1

Europe pushes back

European leaders at an EU summit in Dublin on Friday rejected the idea of reopening the continent's security order. "If we start to talk about what Russia is asking regarding the security architecture, we actually walk into the traps that Russia is setting us," said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, insisting a ceasefire must come first, per AFP.france24.com

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the Kremlin's push "the same old game." "There is no need to talk about European security architecture. We have that already," he said, Reuters reported. He added that the existing framework is "NATO, and specifically the European component of NATO," according to Anadolu. Merz also urged Trump to avoid "surprises" at expected talks with Putin in China next week, Reuters reported.theolympian.com+2

Some analysts say negotiators may offer Moscow concessions on NATO's posture in exchange for peace in Ukraine. European leaders are alarmed by that possibility, AP noted.apnews.com