NATO Rejects Russia Demand for Unaligned Ukraine as Biden Visits

Russias demand that Ukraine guarantee it wont join NATO violates the countrys independence, the head of the alliance said, as the two sides traded accusations over who is fueling the conflict in the ex-Soviet republic.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to arrive in Kiev for talks today with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko after North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged Vladimir Putins government to pull back its troops from inside eastern Ukraine and from the border area. Meanwhile, Russias State Security Council said the U.S. was instigating the fighting.

We call on Russia to stop fueling the conflict, Stoltenberg said in Tallinn, Estonia. He also urged Russia to use all its influence to make sure pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine are respecting a Sept. 5 cease-fire that has been broken almost daily.

The Ukrainian crisis has intensified since the pro-Russian rebels in two breakaway regions held Nov. 2 elections that the government in Kiev condemned as illegitimate. Ukraine, the European Union and the U.S. accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of supporting the separatists. Russia denies involvement.

The United Nations cited a total breakdown of law and order in eastern Ukraine and linked Russian fighters to human-rights violations in a report yesterday. It raised its estimation of the death toll there to least 4,317 people, with 9,921 wounded and 466,829 displaced.

The continuing presence of a large amount of sophisticated weaponry, as well as foreign fighters that include servicemen from the Russian Federation, directly affects the human rights situation in the east of Ukraine, according to the UN report posted on the website of human rights chief Zeid Raad Al Hussein. Civilians have continued to be killed, unlawfully detained, tortured and disappeared.

The conflict has unnerved countries in Europes former communist east, with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite saying that Putin is pushing Russia to be aggressive, to occupy other regions and to drastically reorganize international security in the world, and especially in Europe.

Were facing a situation in which some of our neighbors are becoming a terrorist country, she said yesterday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday faulted a reckless, nonstop expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union as undermining European security and contributing to the conflict in Ukraine.

The U.S. was one of the initiators of the conflict in Ukraine, and if they supply weapons there, the conflict will grow, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told reporters in Moscow yesterday.

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NATO Rejects Russia Demand for Unaligned Ukraine as Biden Visits