US and Russia have used special Ukraine war ‘deconfliction’ hotline once so far, US official says

Although the US official declined to specify which Russian activity raised the US alarm, there have been publicly acknowledged incidents involving Russian fighting around critical Ukrainian infrastructure.

These include Russian operations around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s biggest, which is under Russian control.

Ukraine has also voiced concerns Russia might blow up the Nova Kakhovka dam, which holds back an enormous reservoir in southern Ukraine. Bursting the dam would send a wall of water flooding settlements below, including towards the strategic regional capital Kherson, which Ukrainian forces recaptured on November 11.

US-Russia communications have been in the spotlight since the start of Russia’s invasion of its neighbour, given the grave risk that a miscalculation by either side could cause a direct conflict between the nuclear-armed nations.

The deconfliction line is just one of several ways the US and Russia militaries still have to communicate.

Other military channels include rare high-level talks between US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. The top US and Russian generals, US Army General Mark Milley and Russian General Valery Gerasimov, have also spoken on two occasions since the war started, his office said.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director Bill Burns have also had contact with Russian officials.

Still, US-Russia relations are at their lowest point since the Cold War and the US State Department said on Monday that Moscow postponed talks in Cairo aimed at resuming nuclear weapons inspections. The Russian foreign ministry confirmed the talks were postponed. Neither side provided a reason.

Asked for comment on the deconfliction line, the Pentagon said only that it retained several channels to “discuss critical security issues with the Russians during a contingency or emergency for the purposes of preventing miscalculation, military incidents, and escalation”.

“We are encouraged by recent senior DoD calls with Russian counterparts and believe continued dialogue is critical,” a Department of Defence spokesperson said.

Neither Russia’s embassy in Washington nor its defence ministry in Moscow responded to requests for comment.

When it was announced in March, the Pentagon said the deconfliction line was created to avoid any inadvertent clashes in Nato airspace or on the ground.

“It’s not meant to be an all-purpose complaint line where we can just pick up the phone and register concerns about what Russia’s doing in Ukraine,” a senior US defence official said at the time.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union maintained such hot lines at different levels.

Alexander Vershbow, a former US ambassador to Moscow and a former senior Pentagon and Nato official, said the latest deconfliction line was meant to focus on daily operations – as opposed to the more strategic conversations between top officials like Milley and Gerasimov.

Vershbow drew a comparison to the far more active deconfliction line for Syria, where US and Russian military forces sometimes operate in the same airspace or terrain.

“We’ve seen this in Syria, where having the direct operational channel can at least clarify intentions during a fast-moving situation where maybe Washington is asleep,” Vershbow told Reuters.

The deconfliction line is tested twice daily with calls conducted in Russian, the US official said. A Russian speaker from the US European Command initiates those calls out of Wiesbaden, Germany, the official said.

Wiesbaden is also the location of the Pentagon’s new Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, or SAG-U, which remotely supports the Kyiv government’s defence against Russian troops.

US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have previously said that early in the conflict planners believed the deconfliction line could be useful if the United States needed to evacuate Americans from Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine.

When the war began, the United States thought Russia might be able to quickly capture Ukrainian territory, trapping American citizens before they had a chance to leave.

One official had speculated it also could have been used if a Russian fighter plane chased a Ukrainian aircraft into Polish airspace, or if a Russian missile crossed Nato airspace.