By Michael Crowley and Anton Troianovski
New York Times
January 21, 2022
GENEVA — The United States and Russia agreed on Friday to keep diplomacy alive in their standoff over Ukraine, even as both sides continued to raise the military stakes on the ground.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, in a hastily scheduled meeting in Geneva that the United States would provide written responses next week to Russia’s demands that the West scale back its military presence in Eastern Europe.
Both sides said that the diplomats planned to speak again after that, and they left the door open to another conversation between President Biden and President Vladimir V. Putin to try to resolve the crisis.