Moscow | The Kremlin on Tuesday denounced the alerting of thousands of American troops because of the Russian-Western crisis over Ukraine, seeing it as a new “exacerbation of tensions” by Washington.
“It is with great concern that we see these American actions,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
According to him, “de facto”, the United States causes “an exacerbation of tensions”.
Washington has placed up to 8,500 soldiers on alert, and they could be ready in five days to reinforce the military alliance’s Rapid Reaction Force, made up of 40,000 soldiers. However, the decision to deploy them has not been taken.
Westerners accuse Moscow of having deployed more than 100,000 soldiers on the border of its pro-Western neighbor, Ukraine, threatening it with invasion.
Russia denies any offensive project, but links a de-escalation of tensions to treaties guaranteeing in particular the non-enlargement of NATO, in particular to Ukraine. These claims were deemed unacceptable in Europe as well as in America.
The United States must nevertheless submit a written response to this list of demands this week. It is in this context that US President Joe Biden has increased the pressure by putting troops on alert.
This hardening, however, seemed to take Europeans by surprise.
French President Emmanuel Macron, for his part, said he wanted to propose “a path of de-escalation” to his counterpart Vladimir Putin during an interview “in the coming days”.