US and allies have ignored Russia’s security demands, Putin says

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the U.S. and its allies have ignored Russia’s top security demands.

In his first comments on the standoff with the West over Ukraine in more than a month, Putin said the Kremlin is still studying the U.S. and NATO’s response to the Russian security demands they received last week.

But he said it was clear that the West has ignored the Russian demands that NATO will not expand to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations, refrain from deploying offensive weapons near Russia and roll back NATO deployments to Eastern Europe.

Putin said the refusal by the U.S. and its allies to heed the Russian demands violate the obligations on integrity of security they made at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He argued that while Western allies emphasize every country’s freedom to choose alliances, they neglect the principle of the “indivisibility of security” enshrined in the OSCE documents.