On December 17th, Russia’s Foreign Ministry handed out a list of proposals. The list included demands that would reduce NATO’s influence over post-Soviet states and block Ukraine and Georgia from joining NATO in the future.

In a statement on Friday, US Senator Jim Risch said that Russia’s demands were a list of concessions for NATO to appease rather than a security agreement.

“The Russian Federation made these demands with the full understanding they are impossible to accept,” and “Putin knows the United States and our 29 NATO allies do not, and will not, negotiate away the future of sovereign nations, like Ukraine, that must be able to make their own choices.”

The Senator also urged US President Joe Biden and all NATO members to reject Russia’s demands, which he believes is “trying to create a pretext for war.”

However, Russia’s Foreign Ministry was not pleased with the response from the West, and Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called Washington and NATO’s response to the security proposals discouraging and said he did not consider the demands unacceptable. He said that the list of proposals provided “is critically important for maintaining peace and stability.”

Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko also said that Russia will “move over to creating counterthreats, but it will then be too late to ask us why we made these decisions and why we deployed these systems.” and that they were “ready to talk about switching over from a military or a military-technical scenario to a political process.”

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