US, Russia top diplomats to meet in Sweden on Thursday

Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet separately with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts on Thursday on the margins of a meeting in Stockholm Sweden amid the Ukraine tensions.

A State Department official confirmed the meetings, which will happen on the sidelines of a minister-level meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Blinken is to meet first with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and later with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The European countries and NATO have accused Russia of recently building up troops along the border of Ukraine, whose government is seeking to align with NATO and the West while Russia has rejected the accusations.

Blinken and Lavrov will meet on the sidelines of the annual two-day meeting of Foreign Ministers from the 57 OSCE countries.

The OSCE is the world's largest regional security organization and gathers countries from North America, Europe and Asia.

Meanwhile, in continuation of the diplomatic row between Washington and Moscow,  Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced on Wednesday that the US diplomats who have been working in Moscow for more than three years have to leave the country by Jan. 31, in a tit-for-tat move for the US forcing 27 Russian diplomatic staffers to leave the country by the end of January.

KI/PR