In Brussels, NATO officials will meet with Russian team on Ukraine

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In Brussels, NATO officials will meet with Russian team on Ukraine

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Russia meets Wednesday with NATO members to discuss the future of Ukraine, where Russia has already annexed² the Crimean peninsula, stirred up an insurgency³ and is now threatening another invasion.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

NATO has just wrapped up talks with Russia in Brussels. It was all an attempt to reduce tensions on the Ukraine border, where Russia has massed troops amid a series of demands. The fear and worst-case scenario⁴ - a land war in Europe. NPR's London correspondent Frank Langfitt has been covering all this, and he joins us now. Frank, where are we at? Was there any progress at all?

FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE⁵: You know, not if you listened to the press conference today afterwards with NATO's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg. Both sides seem really dug in for now. Russia - among its demands are it wants NATO to stop letting in new countries, particularly Ukraine because Ukraine has a large border - 1,200-mile border - with Russia. And it's also asked NATO to basically pull back its troop deployments to a time when NATO was much, much smaller, back in 1997. NATO - for its perspective, it says, you know, we'll keep talking to you, but we want you to pull your troops back from the Ukrainian border right now. So Stoltenberg says they're in the neighborhood of 100,000 Russian troops on the border there, which, you know, Ukraine finds naturally pretty threatening. So at the moment, what's not clear, Rachel, is an off-ramp in this dispute between Russia and NATO.

MARTIN: How do NATO leaders see the stakes of this, and how is the U.S. wrapped up in it?

LANGFITT: Yeah, the stakes here, I think, are really big. You hinted it at the beginning. The possibility of a land war with a major power like Russia in Europe is very frightening in the way that it could destabilize the region. And certainly, Russia has already done this before, to some extent. In 2014, it annexed Crimea. It also has troops in Georgia and elsewhere. And so I think the concern is that it just creates more tension in the region. The United States' interest is the United States is far and away the largest military power in NATO. It helped create NATO after the Cold War, and it was to defend against what was then the Soviet⁷ Union.

Well, what sort of happened here - of course, the Soviet Union collapsed⁸, and NATO then began to expand in the 1990s. And this really upset the Soviets⁹ - or the Russians, at that point - certainly, and they felt to some degree like the United States was taking advantage of all of their problems. And so what you're seeing in recent years, particularly with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia is pushing back, at least from his perspective, against NATO. The concern, though, is that we're just not - these are really - people have very different opinions here, and it's not clear how they can resolve it.

MARTIN: So the risk is a land war in Europe. And what, after this...

LANGFITT: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...Everyone just, like, goes back to their Outlook calendars and says, let's schedule some more talks?

LANGFITT: Well, at the moment, right now, what NATO's offering is not what Russia wants. They're saying, well, we'll talk about limiting missile deployments in Europe. And they say if you go into Ukraine, we might deploy⁶ even more troops into some of our Eastern allies. And so we don't see a way out of this at the moment. There is a little bit of a time pressure here on Russia, in the sense that if it does want to make some kind of move - and most people do not think that Russia would actually try to take over Ukraine. It's an enormous country. But they might try to take a part of Ukraine, as they did in 2014. One thing is that the weather is a factor. When you get into late March, it begins to rain quite a bit, and that becomes a problem for Russian armor, moving around Ukraine. For the moment, they're still - both sides are certainly willing to talk. We're waiting to hear, of course, from the Russians. Their delegation¹⁰ hasn't commented yet, and it'll be very interesting and very important to see what their take is on how things went today.

MARTIN: NPR's London correspondent Frank Langfitt, thanks for all this, Frank. We appreciate it.

LANGFITT: Good to talk, Rachel.

1 transcript   

n.抄本，誊本，副本，肄业证书

参考例句：

• A transcript of the tapes was presented as evidence in court.一份录音带的文字本作为证据被呈交法庭。
• They wouldn't let me have a transcript of the interview.他们拒绝给我一份采访的文字整理稿。

2 annexed   

[法] 附加的，附属的

参考例句：

• Germany annexed Austria in 1938. 1938年德国吞并了奥地利。
• The outlying villages were formally annexed by the town last year. 那些偏远的村庄于去年正式被并入该镇。

3 insurgency   

n.起义；暴动；叛变

参考例句：

• And as in China, unrest and even insurgency are widespread. 而在中国，动乱甚至暴乱都普遍存在。 来自互联网
• Dr Zyphur is part an insurgency against this idea. 塞弗博士是这一观点逆流的一部分。 来自互联网

4 scenario   

n.剧本，脚本；概要

参考例句：

• But the birth scenario is not completely accurate.然而分娩脚本并非完全准确的。
• This is a totally different scenario.这是完全不同的剧本。

5 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

6 deploy   

v.（军）散开成战斗队形，布置，展开

参考例句：

• The infantry began to deploy at dawn.步兵黎明时开始进入战斗位置。
• The president said he had no intention of deploying ground troops.总统称并不打算部署地面部队。

7 Soviet   

adj.苏联的，苏维埃的；n.苏维埃

参考例句：

• Zhukov was a marshal of the former Soviet Union.朱可夫是前苏联的一位元帅。
• Germany began to attack the Soviet Union in 1941.德国在1941年开始进攻苏联。

8 collapsed   

adj.倒塌的

参考例句：

• Jack collapsed in agony on the floor. 杰克十分痛苦地瘫倒在地板上。
• The roof collapsed under the weight of snow. 房顶在雪的重压下突然坍塌下来。

9 soviets   

苏维埃（Soviet的复数形式）

参考例句：

• A public challenge could provoke the Soviets to dig in. 公开挑战会促使苏联人一意孤行。
• The Soviets proposed the withdrawal of American ballistic-missile submarines from forward bases. 苏联人建议把美国的弹道导弹潜艇从前沿基地撤走。

10 delegation   

n.代表团；派遣

参考例句：

• The statement of our delegation was singularly appropriate to the occasion.我们代表团的声明非常适合时宜。
• We shall inform you of the date of the delegation's arrival.我们将把代表团到达的日期通知你。