A fresh report in Financial Times has revealed that during US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Moscow demanded that NATO and American forces are withdrawn from eastern Europe as a condition for "normalizing relations."
Sources in Romania's government revealed the request, which was rejected by the team led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But NATO countries along the alliance's so-called Eastern flank are still worried: "Cristian Diaconescu, the Romanian president’s chief of staff and adviser for defense and national security, said on Wednesday that the US delegation had rejected Moscow’s demand, but that there were no guarantees that Washington would not eventually make this concession to Vladimir Putin," FT reports.
Of course, NATO militarization right to up Russia's doorstep, a historic trend which reaches back to 1990s, when Moscow demanded not one more inch east, remains a key Kremlin justification for the Ukraine war.
Given this week's anti-Zelensky rhetoric coming out of the US administration, the European allies are worried Trump will give away more (after already declaring that Ukraine won't become a NATO member). This concern was expressed to FT as follows:
"As far as I understand, the situation can change from hour to hour or from day to day," Diaconescu told Antena3 television, in a reference to US President Donald Trump’s scathing criticism of the Ukrainian leader and his concessions made to Russia even before talks began.
Diaconescu stressed that the Russian delegation to the talks in Riyadh earlier this week "failed to convince the Americans" on a Nato withdrawal and that further visits by the leaders of the UK and France to Washington next week would seek to persuade Trump not to give in to this demand.
No real details on specifically what the Russians requested as a condition for fully restoring and improving US relations has been revealed by the US side. However, staff at each of their respective embassies are being restored.
The New York Times has written of Rubio based on a phone call with European diplomats after the Riyadh meeting, "The Secretary of State sought to reassure nervous European allies that the talks [in Riyadh] did not represent an abrupt departure from American policies, as many feared."
In December 2022, just before Russian forces poured across the Ukraine border later in February, President Putin told a news conference, "You promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly."
Below: Jeffrey Sachs gives a review of events leading up to the Ukraine war...
But the Kremlin is signaling it believes the Trump White House understands its positions well. FM Sergey Lavrov had also hailed the Riyadh meeting as "very useful" and that talks will continue. "I have every reason to believe that the American side understands our position," Lavrov had said.