Russia Revives Demand That NATO Retrench to Secure Ukraine Deal

Two months before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it issued a series of far-reaching demands, including that NATO pull its troops back to positions they held in 1997, before the Western alliance expanded toward Russia’s borders.

Now, in closed-door negotiations with President Trump’s envoys this week about how to end the war in Ukraine, the Russians have revived that stance — in some cases word for word — in an effort to attain a larger victory after five years and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Moscow’s unyielding position was laid out in a paper that Russian officials circulated this week, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times from a person involved in the talks.

The paper, whose authenticity was confirmed by another person with knowledge of the negotiations, shows that President Vladimir V. Putin has scarcely budged on his core objectives after more than 20 months of diplomacy by the Trump administration to end the conflict.

Russia’s demands that NATO pull back forces from its eastern flank in Poland and the Baltics thrust the question of European security into the heart of the negotiations over Ukraine. And they detail the objective behind Mr. Putin’s public statements. The Russian leader has continually insisted that what he calls the “root causes” of the war — Russia’s wide-ranging grievances with both NATO and Ukraine — be addressed before he stops fighting.

The document also underscores how the economic inducements that Mr. Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have offered Mr. Putin have yet to secure concessions from Moscow. To critics, the United States risks enabling Mr. Putin’s long-running attempt to reassert a Soviet-era sphere of influence from Europe to Central Asia.