The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrive at Harpa Concert Hall as they arrive for a meeting at the Arctic Council Ministerial Summit in Reykjavik, Iceland on May 19, 2021, on the sidelines of the Arctic Council Ministerial Summit. STOCKHOLM, Dec 2 Reuters - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday during a European security conference, amid escalating tensions over Moscow's build-up of troops near its border with Ukraine.
The meeting is scheduled to take place on the sidelines of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe OSCE in Stockholm. Blinken will meet with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. After a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, Blinken expressed U.S. concerns about Russia's large-scale military operations and what he said were its efforts to destabilise Ukraine from within. We don't know whether President Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade. "We do know that he's putting in place the capacity to do so in short order, if he so decides," said Blinken.
He added that the United States is ready to respond with a range of high impact economic measures that we have refrained from pursuing in the past.
A senior State Department official told reporters that Blinken is expected to relay the threat of further sanctions if Russia fails to end troop build-up on Ukraine's border and to remind him that there is a diplomatic solution.
The official said that the dialogue is more important when things are not going well. I m certain that the Secretary is going to make clear that there is a diplomatic off-ramp and that there is a diplomatic off-ramp, beyond making clear the costs of Russian actions. Ukraine, a former Soviet republic who aspires to join the European Union and NATO, has become the main point of conflict between Russia and the West as relations have soured to their worst level in the last three decades since the Cold War ended.
Ukraine says Russia has deployed more than 90,000 troops near their long shared border.
Moscow accuses Kyiv of pursuing its own military build-up. It has dismissed as inflammatory suggestions that it is preparing for an attack on Ukraine, but has defended its right to deploy troops on its own territory as it sees fit. Putin said that Russia would have to act if NATO placed missiles in Ukraine that could strike Moscow within a few minutes. In 2014 the Kremlin annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine and supported rebels fighting Kyiv government forces in the east of the country. The conflict has killed 14,000 people and is still simmering, according to Kyiv.
As well as Ukraine, other issues including cybersecurity and the Kremlin's treatment of its critics have also helped drive relations between Washington and Moscow to post-Cold War lows.
Three sources told Reuters that U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director William Burns raised the issue of Russian cyberattacks during a rare visit to Moscow earlier this month.
Another area of East-West tensions has been the refugee crisis between Belarus, a Russian ally, and NATO members Poland and Lithuania.
Western nations accuse Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko of rigging the migrant crisis in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Minsk over its human rights record. Minsk blames the West for the humanitarian crisis.