Russia Claims Some Troop Pullbacks as Putin Calls for Talks; NATO Is Skeptical

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin said on Tuesday that Russia had decided “to partially pull back troops” as the Defense Ministry announced that some forces from military districts bordering Ukraine were being sent back to their garrisons, a tentative sign that Russia could be stepping away from the threat of an invasion.

The announcement was the strongest signal yet that Russia might be trying to de-escalate the military standoff near the Ukrainian border, but it was far from clear that the threat of war had passed.

Speaking at the Kremlin alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Mr. Putin said Russia would keep pushing for its central demands of a rollback of the NATO presence in Eastern Europe and a guarantee that Ukraine never join the alliance.

“We are also ready to continue on the negotiating track, but all these questions, as has been said before, must be viewed comprehensively,” Mr. Putin said.

It couldn’t be determined how many troops were being pulled back, and a Defense Ministry spokesman, Igor Konashenkov, said that some military exercises that have raised fears of an attack against Ukraine — including in Belarus and in the Black Sea — were continuing.

U.S. officials said they were still assessing Russia’s troop announcement, and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said that members of the alliance “have not seen any sign of de-escalation.” Mr. Stoltenberg added that Russia has moved forces around before while leaving heavy weapons in place.

Still, Mr. Putin’s comments added to signs that Moscow was willing to pursue its objectives through negotiations rather than launch immediate military action. When asked about how Russia would act next, Mr. Putin responded with a slight smile: “According to the plan.”

He said Russia would seek to achieve its key aims but that the outcome of the process “does not only depend on us.”

“We intend to and will strive to reach agreement with our partners on the questions that we posed, in order to solve them by taking a diplomatic path,” Mr. Putin said.

Earlier Tuesday, Moscow added to its leverage in talks when lawmakers in Russia’s Kremlin-backed lower house of Parliament on Tuesday asked Mr. Putin to recognize breakaway states in eastern Ukraine as independent, raising fears that Russia could use such recognition to move more of its military into the areas.

Mr. Putin said at the new conference that he would not immediately recognize their independence.

On Monday, Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu appeared to characterize Russia’s enormous troop buildup around Ukraine as part of “large-scale drills” being carried out by the military. He told Mr. Putin in a stage-managed meeting broadcast on state television that some of those drills were now ending.

Then on Tuesday, Mr. Konashenkov said in a televised statement that some troops of the southern and western military districts had “completed their tasks” and were heading back to their bases. Russian state television aired footage of tanks being loaded onto rail cars, describing it as images of troops headed back to their garrisons.

The troops that Mr. Konashenkov said are being pulled back are from the military districts closest to Ukraine — meaning they would remain relatively close to the country even if they are pulled back to their bases. His statement indicated that troops that have arrived in the region from farther away — Siberia and Russia’s Far East — would remain deployed near Ukraine for now.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that there was reason to be skeptical of Moscow’s statements.

“When we see the withdrawal, we will believe in de-escalation,” Mr. Kuleba told reporters during a video briefing from Kyiv.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, characterized the troop movements as routine, and continued to describe Western warnings of Russia’s military buildup as overblown. Moscow had always intended that when the drills were over, “troops move back to their barracks,” he said. “This is what is happening this time too — there is nothing new.”

But Russia continued to shift away from its more pessimistic official rhetoric of recent weeks.

Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, speaking at a news conference, said that in ongoing talks, the West had “responded positively to initiatives that it had for a long time rejected.”

“I think that thanks to efforts in all these areas, it will be possible to come up with a very decent, comprehensive package result,” Mr. Lavrov said.

In a sign that Russia was prepared to keep the pressure on Ukraine despite reportedly pulling back some troops from border areas, its Kremlin-controlled lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, passed a resolution on Tuesday requesting that President Vladimir V. Putin recognize the Russian-backed separatist territories in Ukraine’s east as independent states.

Such a move would represent Russia’s abandonment of the 2015 peace plan for those territories, and could raise the risk of warfare between Russia and Ukraine. The separatists claim all of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions as their territory, but control only about one-third of those lands.

Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Duma, said the resolution would be signed and transmitted to Mr. Putin “without delay.”

Mr. Putin said that he would not immediately recognize their independence. But the resolution effectively gives him another bargaining chip in his talks with Western leaders and another point of leverage over Ukraine.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, said that if Russia did recognize Donetsk and Luhansk it would be “a blatant violation of Ukrainian sovereignty again,” as well as a violation of international law and of the 2015 agreement.

“There is no doubt that Donetsk and Luhansk are part of Ukraine within internationally recognized borders,” Mr. Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.

The United States temporarily relocated its C.I.A. station in Kyiv on Tuesday, a day after the State Department announced its diplomatic corps would move to Lviv, a western city near the border with Poland, because of the Russian military buildup near Ukraine, according to officials briefed on the shift.

Removing C.I.A. officers from Kyiv could make collecting information on Russian activity inside Ukraine more difficult. The U.S. has been working to collect intelligence, declassify it and expose what officials have called various Russian plots to undermine or replace the Ukrainian government.

On Monday, the State Department also recommended that U.S. citizens leave Belarus and Transnistria, a Russian-backed breakaway region in Moldova. Both Belarus and Transnistria neighbor Ukraine.

The department had said on Saturday that it would move most of its diplomatic staff in Kyiv to Lviv, but not all, indicating that it would keep the embassy operating. A department spokesman, Ned Price, declined to say at a news briefing on Monday how many people remained in Kyiv and were covered by the decision to shut the embassy.

Amid fears of a Russian invasion, the United States has strongly urged its citizens to leave Ukraine and has ordered some personnel and their families out of the country.

Kyiv lies within easy reach of Russian forces massed in western Russia and in Belarus. Lviv sits nearly 300 miles farther west, close to Ukraine’s border with Poland.

“I have no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans around the world, and that, of course, includes our colleagues serving at our posts overseas,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in a statement.

Among those who have already relocated to Lviv, Mr. Price said, is Kristina A. Kvien, the embassy’s chargé d’affaires — the person in charge of an embassy when no ambassador is present. He said Ukrainian police would protect the compound in Kyiv.

“It is certainly our intention to return to that Embassy in Kyiv just as soon as it is safe for us to do so,” Mr. Price said.

A reporter and a photographer for The New York Times set off on a journey to explore what it means to be a Ukrainian at this moment of national peril. For 560 miles, they followed the Dnieper, a sickle-shaped river that stretches the length of Ukraine, physically separating the country’s western regions from the lands to the east, long considered to be more susceptible to Moscow’s gravitational pull. See the full story here.

For decades, Germany has been a steadfast consumer of Russian natural gas, a relationship that has seemingly grown closer over the years, surviving Cold War-era tensions, the breakup of the former Soviet Union and even European sanctions against Moscow over its annexation of Crimea. Until this winter.

Since November, the amount of natural gas arriving in Germany from Russia has plunged, driving prices through the roof and draining reserves. These are changes that Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled energy behemoth, has been regularly pointing out.

“As much as 85 percent of the gas injected in Europe’s underground gas storage facilities last summer is already withdrawn,” Gazprom said on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, adding that “facilities in Germany and France are already two-thirds empty.”

With tensions between the West and Russia over Ukraine — a key transit country for Russian gas — showing few signs of easing, Germany’s new minister for the economy and climate change, Robert Habeck, has begun to raise an issue that was unthinkable just a year or two ago: looking beyond Russia for the country’s natural gas needs.

“The geopolitical situation forces us to create other import opportunities and diversify supply,” Mr. Habeck, who is a member of the environmentalist Greens, said last week. “We need to act here and secure ourselves better. If we don’t, we will become a pawn in the game.”

U.S. officials are warning that Russia could invade Ukraine in a matter of days. Russia says its buildup of troops and weapons is part of planned military exercises. But U.S. officials and independent military experts say at least half of Russia’s battalion tactical groups, which are designed for ground combat, have been deployed near Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine — For Ukraine, joining the NATO security alliance is an aspiration enshrined in its constitution. And although Western leaders say membership is at best a distant prospect at best, Russia regards even the possibility as an existential threat.

That dispute is at the core of Russia’s menacing military buildup surrounding Ukraine. The United States and NATO have said that the decision to seek membership should be up to individual countries, and in public Ukrainian officials have insisted that there is no change in their position.

But on Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine did not rule out the possibility of dropping his country’s bid to join NATO, saying: “Maybe the question of open doors is for us like a dream.”

While emphasizing that NATO membership “is for our security and it is in the constitution,” Mr. Zelensky, speaking at a news conference alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, acknowledged the difficult place the country finds itself in, nearly completely encircled by Russian or Russian-backed forces, and with partners like the United States insisting it will not send troops into Ukraine to repel a Russian invasion.

“How much should Ukraine go on that path?” Mr. Zelensky said of NATO membership. “Who will support us?”

Mr. Zelensky was responding to a question about comments made by Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain, who told BBC radio on Sunday that his government was “flexible in trying to find the best way out” and was considering dropping the country’s NATO ambitions.

Since December, the Ukrainian government has been quietly pursuing negotiations that could lead to acceptance of some form of neutrality, or another solution more narrowly focused on Russian demands in a cease-fire agreement in the long-running conflict in eastern Ukraine.

In public, officials including the current foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, have rejected concessions as counterproductive and likely only to encourage further Russian aggression.

Mr. Prystaiko, a former foreign minister who served under President Zelensky, was asked in the BBC interview: “If it averts war, will your country contemplate not joining NATO, dropping that as a goal?”

He replied: “We might, especially being threatened like that, blackmailed like that, and pushed to it.”

While emphasizing that even commenting on the possibility could be seen as violating Ukrainian laws, he went on: “What I’m saying here, is we are flexible in trying to find the best way out. If we have to go through some serious concessions, that’s something we might do, that is for sure.”

His comments caused a stir, and the Ukrainian government quickly sought to clarify the matter. The spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, Oleh Nikolenko, tweeted that Mr. Prystaiko’s comments had been reported out of context. “Ukraine’s position remains unchanged,” he said. “The goal of NATO membership is enshrined in the constitution.”

Mr. Prystaiko later emphaisized in an interview with Yevropaiska Pravda, a Ukrainian news outlet, that “there are no changes now” to the country’s stance. But because Ukraine is not a member of the alliance, he said, in the current standoff with Russia “we cannot count on NATO because we are not a member of the family.”

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, welcomed the ambassador’s comments while acknowledging the response from the Ukrainian foreign ministry.

“Clearly, Ukraine’s confirmed rejection of the idea of joining NATO would be a step that would significantly facilitate the formulation of a better response to Russia’s concerns,” Mr. Peskov said on Monday. But given the confusion around the comments, he added: “We cannot interpret it as a fact that Kyiv’s conceptual worldview has changed.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III will meet with NATO leaders in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine, the Pentagon announced on Monday.

Mr. Austin will then to Poland to visit American troops and to Lithuania to meet with Baltic leaders, said John F. Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.

Speaking on Monday, Mr. Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was still prepared to strike at Ukraine, and dismissed Russian assertions that the buildup of some 130,000 troops was simply seasonal land and naval drills.

“It strains credulity to think that they would have this many troops arrayed along the border with Ukraine and in Belarus simply for winter exercises,” he said.

The Pentagon on Friday ordered 3,000 additional troops to Poland, bringing to 5,000 the number of reinforcements sent to Europe in the past two weeks.

The purpose of the troops, nearly all from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., will be to reassure NATO allies that while the United States does not intend to send troops into Ukraine, President Biden would protect America’s NATO allies from any Russian aggression. Poland borders Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, a close ally of Russia.

Also on Monday, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Lt. Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s military, discussed the “security environment in Eastern Europe” during a phone call, the Joint Staff said in a statement.

“Ukraine is a key partner to NATO and plays a critical role in maintaining peace and stability in Europe,” it said.