According to the Associated Press, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who headed the Russian delegation in Monday’s talks with the U.S. in Switzerland, said he would “neither confirm nor exclude” the possibility of Russian troops deploying to Cuba and Venezuela.
The two adversarial nations met earlier this week in an attempt to resolve the heightened tensions over Russia’s military buildup near the Ukrainian border and the threat of a conceivable invasion. Russia, in turn, desires for NATO to stay out of Ukraine and other nations formerly part of the Soviet Union, though both sides have balked at the other's demands.
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“It all depends on the action by our U.S. counterparts,” Ryabkov revealed during an interview with Russian RTVI TV.
This was the first time in the current dust-up that a Russian official acknowledged the prospect of Russian troops heading to the Western Hemisphere.
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“The U.S. wants to conduct a dialogue on some elements of the security situation … to ease the tensions and then continue the process of geopolitical and military development of the new territories, coming closer to Moscow,” he explained. “We have nowhere to retreat.”
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Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Thursday that the Defense Department is "focused on trying to find a way forward in de-escalation of this particular crisis that Russia has caused" when asked about Ryabkov's remark about troop deployments close to the continental U.S.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded that Western powers vow to exclude from NATO Ukraine and other countries that gained independence from the Soviet Union and curtail the military support offered to NATO allies in Eastern Europe.
“There was no commitment to de-escalation, no,” Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State, who led the U.S. delegation to meet Russian officials in Geneva and then in Brussels, told reporters earlier this week. “There was no commitment to de-escalate, nor was there a statement that there would not be.”
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Alternatively, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed Wednesday that "the continuation of NATO's open-door policy and the further advancement of NATO towards our borders is precisely what, from our point of view, threatens us. This is exactly what we are asking not to continue through legally binding guarantees.”
Russian officials underscored the stakes of the meeting by kicking off live fire military exercises near Ukraine but declined to make the threat explicit.
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