Russia begins partial troop withdrawal from Ukraine border

Moscow is starting to return some troops at the Ukrainian border to their bases, the Russian government announced Tuesday, but Ukraine’s president and Western officials have urged caution over taking Russia’s claims at face value.

In a statement early Tuesday, Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, said troops that had recently been posted to Russia’s southern and western military districts — which share a border with Ukraine — had completed their military drills and “have already begun loading onto rail and road transport and will begin moving to their military garrisons today.”

Konashenkov also announced that Russian troops currently engaged in military drills in neighboring Belarus, which shares a border with Ukraine to the latter’s north, would return to their permanent bases when the exercises ended on Feb. 20.

However, in a response to Russia later Tuesday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said: “We in Ukraine have a rule: we don’t believe what we hear, we believe what we see. If a real withdrawal follows these statements, we will believe in the beginning of a real de-escalation.”

Thousands of Russian troops began engaging in military drills last week in a move that was widely seen as a display of strength by Moscow. The drills came as more than 100,000 soldiers, tanks, missiles and even fresh blood supplies had been moved to Russia’s border with Ukraine.
 
Moscow has repeatedly insisted it has no plans to invade Ukraine, despite warnings from Western countries in recent days that an invasion is likely to be imminent.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told a press conference on Tuesday that he saw some leeway for further discussions with the West over the situation in Ukraine, Reuters reported, reiterating that Russia had decided upon a partial withdrawal of its troops from the border.

His comments came several hours after the Kremlin dubbed U.S. warnings that Moscow would launch an attack on Wednesday “baseless hysteria.” A Kremlin spokesperson had also said tensions had been exacerbated by a huge buildup of Ukrainian forces and Western claims that war was imminent, according to Reuters.

The situation at Ukraine’s border is part of a broader, long-term issue.

Russian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to ask Putin to recognize two Russian-supported breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent. Around 13,000 people in east Ukraine have died in an ongoing conflict between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region, which Putin referred to as “genocide” at the news conference on Tuesday.

Russian envoy to the EU Vladimir Chizhov said on Tuesday that Russia will not invade Ukraine “unless we are provoked.”

“If the Ukrainians launch an attack against Russia, you shouldn’t be surprised if we counterattack,” he said, according to the state news agency TASS. “Or, if they start blatantly killing Russian citizens anywhere — Donbas or wherever.”
‘No sign of de-escalation’
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference Tuesday that while there was reason for “cautious optimism” over the situation in Ukraine, the military alliance so far had “not seen any sign of de-escalation on the ground from the Russian side.”

“Russia has amassed a fighting force in and around Ukraine unprecedented since the Cold War,” he said. “Everything is in place for a new attack. But Russia still has time to step back from the brink, stop preparing for war and start working for a peaceful solution.”

NATO has not received any response from Russia regarding its request for a meeting to discuss the current situation, Stoltenberg told reporters, adding that any move from Russia into Ukraine would violate international law.

He added that Russia’s continued efforts to destabilize Ukraine, through its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support of Russian separatists in the country, as well as the current buildup of troops along the Ukrainian border and near NATO territory, meant the organization may need to consider making long-term security adjustments.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the U.K.’s Foreign Office told CNBC in an email that Britain will “judge the Russians by their actions not their words.”

Win for the West?

Timothy Ash, senior emerging markets sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, said in a note Tuesday that “if Putin has really blinked, this would be huge win for Biden, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy] and the West,” adding that it would be difficult to see the entire situation as anything but a big defeat for Putin.

“What did he achieve?” he said. “He managed to rally the West back around NATO, which again has common purpose. Ukrainian sovereignty [has been] affirmed, even strengthened.”

As a result of Russia’s aggressive activity, Ukraine’s military was now better armed and better able to defend itself, Ash added.

“Russia has been called out as an unreliable energy supplier — the West will accelerate diversification away from Russian energy sources,” he said. “Some will say [Putin] was the Russian leader who actually lost Ukraine. That will be his mark in history — he accelerated Ukraine’s Western orientation.”

SOURCE: CNBC