These are the five demands from Russia in war with Ukraine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has entered its seventh day on Wednesday, with a huge deployment of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles surrounding the capital, Kyiv, and heavy shelling there and in other big cities.

While the international community has announced several stringent measures to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has hit back saying, its key security demands have not been made by the West, especially the US that could have avoided the bloodshed.

What are the key Russian demands in the war with Ukraine?

In his first public comments since December about the brewing Russia-Ukraine crisis, Putin slammed the US and the West for not meeting his key demands to avoid a full-scale military conflict with Ukraine that has now threatened European security.

1. Russian leader put forward a highly contentious list of security guarantees that Moscow wants the West to agree to in order to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine. In a joint news conference with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán following their meeting in the Kremlin, Putin said that the West has ignored Russia’s demands that NATO not expand to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet countries.

2. Another key demand from Russia is that NATO should limit its deployment of troops and weapons to the alliance’s eastern flank, in effect returning the allied forces to where they were stationed in 1997, before an eastward expansion, which would include much of eastern Europe, including Poland, the former Soviet countries of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Balkan countries.

3. President Putin further said that Moscow wants a guarantee from Ukraine that it will not enter the US-led NATO.

4. Russia has also demanded that NATO rule out further expansion, including the accession of Ukraine into the alliance, and that it does not hold drills without previous agreement from Russia in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, in Caucasus countries such as Georgia or in Central Asia.

5. Moscow also calls for the two countries US & Russia – to pull back any short- or medium-range missile systems out of reach, replacing the previous intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty that the US left in 2018. Vladimir Putin has demanded that the West provide Russia with “legal guarantees” of its security.