OREANDA-NEWS. Before discussing a face-to-face meeting between Russian and US presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, it is necessary to understand what the US and EU response will be to the draft security guarantee agreement that Russia sent them in December, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview on the Russia 24 channel.

"You know that specific proposals from the Russian side, drafts of two documents, a treaty and an agreement, on security guarantees have been formulated and transmitted to Washington as well as to European capitals. Before we can talk about a new summit, a face-to-face summit [of Putin and Biden], we need to understand what the specific response of the American side and the Europeans to these our proposals will be," Peskov said (quoted by TASS).

He expressed hope that negotiations on the issue would begin in January. According to him, the Russian side hopes for concrete answers to the specifically raised questions.

"And after that it will already be clear whether there is a general foundation on which the next summit can be prepared,"- Peskov concluded.

Putin said in early December that Russia needed legal security guarantees, including those involving NATO's non-expansion to the east. He attributed this need to the fact that Western countries had previously failed to fulfil their verbal commitments.

Russia later handed the U.S. and NATO countries a draft treaty on guarantees. In particular, Moscow proposed to Washington to mutually commit not to damage each other's security, not to use the territory of other countries to prepare an armed attack and to agree not to include at least Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. Russia also proposed that the U.S. not establish military bases on former Soviet territory and return to the principle of no medium- and short-range land-based missiles anywhere other than national territory.

Russia has proposed that NATO reciprocally renounce the deployment of weapons on the territory of all other European countries, rule out NATO expansion and refuse to conduct any military activity in Ukraine.

Washington said it had received the Russian proposals and was discussing them with its partners in Europe. It also promised to provide its list of concerns in response.