Russia hands security requests to US and hails support from China

Russia has said China supports its bid to win binding security guarantees from the United States as it presented specific proposals on the issue to the US amid continuing western concern over Moscow's military build-up close to Ukraine.

Russia has responded to warnings from western powers not to escalate its aggression against Ukraine by claiming that its own safety is threatened by its neighbour's bid to join Nato and by the alliance's eastward expansion of recent decades.

"American representatives were literally today handed concrete proposals in our foreign ministry that are aimed at developing legal security guarantees for Russia," senior Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said on Wednesday.

"We are ready to start negotiations on this crucial issue immediately," he added, as US assistant secretary of state Karen Donfried met Russian foreign ministry and Kremlin officials in Moscow.

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Earlier Russian president Vladimir Putin held video talks with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, and both leaders hailed the deepening ties between their countries and criticised what they see as US attempts to dominate world affairs.

Mr Ushakov said Mr Putin complained to Mr Xi about “mounting threats to Russia’s national interests from the US and the Nato bloc, which consistently move their military infrastructure close to Russia’s borders”.

The Chinese leader “understands Russia’s concerns and fully supports our initiative to work out these security guarantees for Russia”, the adviser added.

Mr Putin told his Chinese counterpart that Russia-China relations represented “a new model of co-operation...based, in part, on the principles of non-interference in each other’s affairs and mutual resolve to turn our common border into a belt of eternal peace and good-neighbourliness”.

They also criticised US president Joe Biden's recent "summit for democracy" – to which neither China nor Russia were invited – and relatively new US partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region: the so-called Quad that includes Japan, India, Australia and the US, and the Aukus security alliance between the US, Britain and Australia.

Relations

“At present certain international forces under the guise of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia, and brutally trampling on international law and recognised norms of international relations,” China’s state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Mr Xi as saying.

“China and Russia should increase their joint efforts to more effectively safeguard the security interests of both parties.”

In Moscow, Dr Donfried “discussed US concerns regarding Russia’s military build-up near Ukraine and reinforced the United States’ commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”, according to the US embassy in the Russian capital.

In Kiev on Tuesday she rejected as “pure disinformation” claims that Washington was pressing Ukraine to make concessions to Russia, which annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a proxy war in eastern Ukraine that has killed 14,000 people.