Ukraine Talks Hit Dead End; Russia Prepares For Military Options

Poland's foreign minister said on Thursday that Europe was closer to war than any time in the last 30 years as Russia gave a bleak assessment of diplomatic efforts this week to defuse tensions over Ukraine, Thomas Escritt and Tom Balmforth reported for Reuters.

Photo Insert: Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau remarked that the risk of war in the OSCE area is now greater than ever before in the last 30 years.

Russia said it was hitting a dead end as it tried to persuade the West to bar Ukraine from joining NATO and roll back decades of alliance expansion in Europe. It offered a stark view before the week's security meetings have even finished, with talks underway in Vienna on Thursday at the 57-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Without naming Russia in his address to envoys from the 57 OSCE members, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau mentioned tensions in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova, all countries with active or frozen conflicts in which Russia has been alleged to be a party.

"It seems that the risk of war in the OSCE area is now greater than ever before in the last 30 years," he said. "For several weeks we have been faced with the prospect of a major military escalation in Eastern Europe," he said, launching his country's year-long chairmanship of the region's largest security organization. He reported no breakthrough at the meeting.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told RTVI television in an interview that Russian military specialists were providing options to President Vladimir Putin in case the situation around Ukraine worsened, but diplomacy must be given a chance.

He said talks with the United States in Geneva on Monday and with NATO in Brussels on Wednesday had shown there was a "dead end or difference of approaches", and he saw no reason to sit down again in the coming days to re-start the same discussions. The US envoy to the OSCE talks said the West should not give in to blackmail.

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