The U.S. Department of State has confirmed that the documents that were published by Spain’s El Pais newspaper earlier were indeed Washington’s written response to Moscow’s proposals on security guarantees.
"I have seen nothing to suggest these documents are not authentic," US Department of State Spokesperson Ned Price said at a briefing.
"We did not make these documents public but now that they are we can confirm what we have always said. We are united with our NATO allies and our resolve to engage in an open, constructive, serious set of diplomatic engagements," Price pointed out. "If Russia actually wants to negotiate a solution as it claims, these documents <...> make clear that there is a path forward to do so. But if the source of these documents, whoever that source may be, thought that by leaking them that they would embarrass the United States that they would drive a wedge between the United States and NATO, I think they will find that they were sorely mistaken in their effort to do so. What the world can now see is that the United States and our NATO allies are in extraordinarily close coordination, that the ideas we put forward are complementary, are symmetrical," the US Department of State spokesperson noted. "You can probably deduce from the documents that they were closely coordinated with one another," he added.
El Pais earlier published documents, which it claimed were the US and NATO’s responses to Russia’s proposals on security guarantees. According to the documents, the US and NATO are ready to discuss European security issues with Russia but cannot accept its key demands to stop NATO’s eastward expansion and bring the alliance’s military infrastructure back to the 1997 borders.
