Two months before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it issued a series of far-reaching demands, including that NATO pull its troops back to positions they held in 1997, before the Western alliance expanded toward Russia’s borders.
Now, in closed-door negotiations with President Trump’s envoys this week about how to end the war in Ukraine, the Russians have revived that stance — in some cases word for word — in an effort to attain a larger victory after five years and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Moscow’s unyielding position was laid out in a paper that Russian officials circulated this week, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times from a person involved in the talks.
The paper, whose authenticity was confirmed by another person with knowledge of the negotiations, shows that President Vladimir V. Putin has scarcely budged on his core objectives after more than 20 months of diplomacy by the Trump administration to end the conflict.
Russia’s demands that NATO pull back forces from its eastern flank in Poland and the Baltics thrust the question of European security into the heart of the negotiations over Ukraine. And they detail the objective behind Mr. Putin’s public statements. The Russian leader has continually insisted that what he calls the “root causes” of the war — Russia’s wide-ranging grievances with both NATO and Ukraine — be addressed before he stops fighting.
The document also underscores how the economic inducements that Mr. Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have offered Mr. Putin have yet to secure concessions from Moscow. To critics, the United States risks enabling Mr. Putin’s long-running attempt to reassert a Soviet-era sphere of influence as far away as Central Asia.
Russia’s decision to stake out this expansive position comes as Mr. Putin is set to sit down with Mr. Trump next week in Shenzhen, China, at an annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific regional economies. It will be the second time the two men will have met in Mr. Trump’s second term.
The Russian document, dated Nov. 10, provides new details on the hard-line stance that the Kremlin took in this week’s talks in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It was the first time since February that U.S., Russian and Ukrainian officials had all met face-to-face, and the first such session since the Trump administration mounted a new push this fall to address Russia’s demands over European security in the Ukraine negotiations.
The document represents Russia’s opening position, and Russian officials in the talks signaled that Mr. Putin could still be flexible, according to the two people involved in the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the sensitive discussions.
But Russian officials in Abu Dhabi made clear that they saw the Cold War, and the Soviet-led alliance at the time known as the Warsaw Pact, as a model for how Europe could look after the war in Ukraine ends. In the decades after World War II, Europe became the focal point of confrontation between nuclear superpowers, with the threat of war hanging over the continent.
But the Russians argued in Abu Dhabi that the separate U.S. and Soviet regions of influence of that era, and the communications and understandings that went along with that arrangement, actually reduced the risk of conflict, according to people present for their remarks.
It remains to be seen how far Moscow will get with that argument.
A U.S. official said that Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner had told the Russians that much had changed since December 2021, when their country demanded a new treaty that would end most NATO military activity across much of Eastern and Central Europe.
The Americans urged the Russians to look toward the future, according to the U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. Mr. Trump’s envoys, the official said, are open to new proposals from Moscow that would include concrete steps by Russia to reduce tensions.
A spokesman for Mr. Putin did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s envoys are now working to allay fears that they will negotiate a sweeping deal with Mr. Putin over the heads of Europe and Ukraine.
After the Abu Dhabi meeting, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff traveled to Moscow to meet with Mr. Putin on Thursday.
There, Mr. Kushner told Mr. Putin in the on-camera portion of the meeting that Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States had already made progress on “long-term security” issues. But Mr. Putin later told the Americans that Russia’s 2021 proposal for a NATO pullback still reflected “our vision of the pillars of an indivisible security architecture,” Yuri Ushakov, the Russian president’s foreign policy adviser, told reporters after the meeting.
From Moscow, the U.S. envoys went to Dublin on Thursday, where they debriefed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Afterward, Mr. Kushner said that “we cannot conclude this deal without Europeans being at the table.”
But the fact that Russia’s opening position on European security this week remained virtually unchanged from five years ago illustrates the scale of the challenge of finding a compromise that will get Mr. Putin to end his war.
This week’s paper spelling out Russia’s position carries no letterhead or signature — it is a “non-paper,” in diplomatic parlance, meant to lay out one side’s views unofficially. Echoing Russia’s December 2021 demands, it says NATO countries must rule out the further expansion of their alliance and as well as “any military activity” in Ukraine and elsewhere in “Eastern Europe, in the South Caucasus and in Central Asia.”
The document shows that if anything, Mr. Putin has doubled down on some of his positions. In 2021, Russia wanted NATO to drop its “nuclear sharing” arrangements that had long allowed U.S. allies in Europe to benefit from the protection of American nuclear weapons. Now, the paper shows, Russia also wants France and Britain to rule out the possibility that they would use their nuclear weapons to protect other European countries, a concept that has been actively discussed in Europe in the past year, partly because of concerns about Mr. Trump’s willingness to come to NATO’s aid.
The paper also seeks to choke off aid to Ukraine, foreseeing an end to “the supply of any type of Western weapons and military equipment and products to Ukraine.” Russia would only approve of Ukraine’s joining the European Union, it says, if Ukraine does not participate in the bloc’s common defense policy.
And, mirroring Russia’s 2021 demands ahead of the invasion, the paper says Russia wants NATO to pull back its troops and bases to the alliance’s 1997 borders, before it began to expand into Central and Eastern Europe — a step that would weaken the ability of the alliance’s most vulnerable members, such as Poland and the ex-Soviet Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to defend themselves.
In recent days, as word of Russia’s hard-line positions rippled out of Abu Dhabi, some European leaders were quick to reject them as nonstarters. Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland said on Thursday that “accepting Russia’s conditions would mean a direct threat to Poland’s security.”
“It is clear that they are unacceptable not only to Ukraine but, above all, to Europe, and certainly to countries such as Poland,” Mr. Tusk said in Dublin.
The talks in Abu Dhabi also included Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the top American military commander in Europe. General Grynkewich, who is also the senior NATO commander, had a lively back-and-forth with Russian officials during the talks, pushing Russian officials to explain their concerns in Europe, according to two people in the room.
Capt. Arlo Abrahamson, a spokesman for General Grynkewich, said the general had attended the talks in his capacity as the head of U.S. European Command to provide military advice for U.S. leadership, but declined to comment given the sensitivity of the negotiations.
The revived Russian demands have come as Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner renewed their push in recent months to fulfill Mr. Trump’s promise to end the war in Ukraine. In doing so, the envoys have deepened talks about possible business deals with Russia and decided to engage with Mr. Putin’s longstanding efforts to negotiate a new European “security architecture.”
Previously, Ukraine’s supporters have said they were only willing to hold such negotiations with Russia after it ended its invasion.
But the circumstances have changed. Luc Frieden, the prime minister of Luxembourg, said in an interview that it was “natural” for the Americans to talk to the Russians and Ukrainians together.
“But they also talk about the future of Europe,” he went on. “We say, ‘Well, you cannot talk about the future of Europe without us being at the table.’”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting.
