Joe Biden will deploy more than 3,000 US troops in Germany, Poland and Romania, as Russia continues to build up its forces around Ukraine, and after talks between Washington and Moscow failed to ease tensions.
The US is sending 1,700 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to Poland, a headquarters unit of about 300 from the 18th Airborne Corps will move to Germany and a 1,000-strong armoured unit is being transferred from Germany to Romania.
“This force is designed to deter aggression and enhance our defensive capabilities in frontline allied states. We expect them to move in coming days,” said John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesperson.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “continues to add forces, combined arms, offensive capabilities, even over just the last 24 hours he continues to add in western Russia and Belarus, and in the Mediterranean and the north Atlantic”, Kirby added. “He has shown no signs of being interested or willing to de-escalate the tensions.”
The Pentagon spokesperson said the deployments were separate from the 8,500 troops in the US that were put on heightened alert to be ready to deploy at short notice. Those forces are mostly earmarked to be part of a Nato Response Force (NRF) intended to bolster the alliance’s eastern flank in the face of a potential Russian attack on Ukraine.
Kirby said the troops being deployed in the coming days were being sent under bilateral agreements with the host countries.
Nato has so far not taken the decision to activate the NRF, which would require the agreement of its 30 member states, including Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orbán, visited Moscow on Tuesday to offer support for Putin and said sanctions on Russia were “doomed to failure”.
European diplomats, however, said that German caution in responding to the crisis was more an obstacle to a rapid activation of the NRF than Hungarian obstructionism.
“Trying to get this done through Nato could take weeks and would only expose all the internal differences,” one diplomat said.
The vanguard of the NRF has been under French command since January and its core is a 3,500-strong Franco-German brigade. The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, welcomed the US deployments and said the alliance could take similar steps to bolster its eastern flank.
“We have increased the readiness of the Nato Response Force, and we are considering the deployment of additional battlegroups to the south-eastern part of the alliance,” Stoltenberg said. “Our deployments are defensive and proportional, and send the clear message that Nato will do whatever is necessary to protect and defend all allies.”
Biden and Stoltenberg have both made clear that no Nato combat troops would be going into Ukraine, though there are a small number of military advisers there. And on Wednesday, the White House spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said the administration would no longer use the word “imminent” with respect to the threat of Russian military action, saying it had sent an “unintended message”. The Ukrainian government had complained about the urgency of US rhetoric, saying it was having damaging effects.
The decision to deploy US troops follows a flurry of diplomacy that has so far failed to deliver any progress in defusing the crisis. On Wednesday the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, warned Putin in a phone call that any further incursion into Ukraine would be “a tragic miscalculation”, according to Downing Street.
The Kremlin account of the call said that Putin had complained his demand for security guarantees had not been met and accused the Kyiv government of “the chronic sabotage” of the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, which were designed to reach a political settlement in the east of Ukraine, including greater autonomy.
France’s Emmanuel Macron was also due to speak to Putin on Wednesday evening, their third conversation in less than a week. German chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Wednesdsay night that he would meet Putin in Moscow soon, without providing a precise date.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has written to the Irish government and other EU members calling for a “prompt response” to the accusation that, by backing Ukraine, they had violated an agreed principle that no country could strengthen its own security at the expense of another’s security, according to an account from the Irish broadcaster, RTÉ.
There has also been exchange of documents over the past few weeks between the US, Nato and Russia setting out their respective positions on European security, and a series of phone calls between the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
The US has suggested a number of areas for negotiation and possible confidence-building measures but has insisted there can be no compromise over Ukraine’s right to join Nato. The alliance has also stated that is non-negotiable. Russia’s central demand is for guarantees that Nato will not expand farther eastward.
Andrey Baklitskiy, an expert on Russia-US relations at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said the Nato response “doesn’t even pretend” to engage with Russian demands.
“It declines all major Russian proposals and comes up with a list of demands that it knows Moscow would not accept,” Baklitsky wrote on Twitter. In one example, he said Nato asks Russia to withdraw forces from Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, “where Moscow either doesn’t accept it has troops or believes they are on steady legal grounds”.
He said that the US non-paper did suggest some new areas for discussion, like the mutual non-deployment of offensive missiles and permanent forces in Ukraine.
“This will find approval in Moscow,” Baklitsky said. He added that the US proposal also “leaves open the possibility that there could be some agreement on strategic bombers not flying too close to each other[’s] territory.”
The US and Nato proposals avoid any discussion of Russia’s controversial demands of a Nato withdrawal from eastern Europe and a pledge never to consider Ukraine’s membership in the security alliance.
“The United States is willing to discuss conditions-based reciprocal transparency measures and reciprocal commitments by both the United States and Russia to refrain from deploying offensive ground-launched missile systems and permanent forces with a combat mission in the territory of Ukraine,” the document read, according to a leaked version in the Spanish newspaper, El País, confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon.
The document suggested confidence-building measures on military exercises and arms control in Europe, as well as deconfliction efforts to avoid an accidental military clash.
It also carried careful demands for the Russian side to draw down its forces near Ukraine. Russia has moved more than an estimated 125,000 troops within striking distance of the Ukrainian border, including nearly half of its available battalion tactical groups and support units.
“Further Russian increases to force posture or further aggression against Ukraine will force the United States and our allies to strengthen our defensive posture,” the document also read, adding that progress could only be achieved in an “environment of de-escalation”.
Russia is still preparing a formal response to the western proposals. Putin on Tuesday accused the US of ignoring Russia’s security proposals in his first public remarks on the crisis since December.
At the same time, Russia has continued its buildup along the Ukrainian border, including from Belarus and the annexed Crimean peninsula. An investigation by the online Conflict Intelligence Team shows that Russian national guard units and possibly riot police have also been deploying to the border region. Those forces could be used to hold ground in case of a Russian attack, analysts have said.
