The Biden administration is heading into next week’s talks with Russia still unsure whether Moscow is serious about negotiations, but if so U.S. officials are ready to propose discussions on scaling back U.S. and Russian troop deployments and military exercises in Eastern Europe, a current administration official and two former U.S. national security officials familiar with the planning told NBC News.
For any change in the U.S. military presence in Europe, Russia would have to take reciprocal, equivalent steps to scale back its forces, and pulling back Russian troops from Ukraine would not be sufficient, the current official and former officials said.
After the publication of this story, White House National Security spokesperson Emily Horne disputed that the U.S. would consider reducing the number of troops permanently stationed in Poland and the Baltic states.
In a statement, Horne said, "The administration is not weighing cuts to troops in Europe, as the headline suggests. The administration is not discussing with Russia the number of troops stationed in the Baltics and Poland. And contrary to the unnamed official quoted in this story, the administration is not compiling a list of force posture changes to discuss in the upcoming talks. These three assertions are false."
A State Department official also said, after publication, "There are three key assertions in the report that has been circulating, those three assertions are false."
After Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, the U.S. and other NATO states deployed a modest number of troops to Eastern Europe, including U.S. armored units, and expanded air and naval patrols along with high-profile military exercises from the Baltics to the Black Sea.
Out of more than 70,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe, roughly 6,000 U.S. forces are deployed in Eastern Europe on a mostly rotating basis, including about 4,000 in Poland. Other NATO countries also have thousands of troops on rotating deployments in the region to bolster the alliance’s eastern flank.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and other U.S. officials are due to meet their Russian counterparts in Geneva on Monday, and then wider talks involving NATO and other European governments are scheduled to follow during the week. The administration has vowed that it will not discuss any issues with Russia that affect other Eastern European countries without including those governments in the talks, citing the principle of “nothing about you without you.”
Only days before the U.S.-Russia talks were due to begin in Geneva, Russia deployed troops to another former Soviet republic, Kazakhstan, a close ally of Moscow. Amid widespread anti-government protests, Russia said it sent in paratroopers as part of a regional peacekeeping mission.
