Russian Pres. Putin has responded to President Bush's letter saying:
- US counterproposals on security were not constructive and ignored Moscow's key concerns
- Russia security proposals were intended as a complete package and not for US to pick and choose from
- that approach raises doubts that Washington committed to fixing security situation in Europe
- growing US and NATO military activity is alarming and Russia's red lines are still being ignored
- US ultimatums for Russia to remove troops from parts of Russia's territory accompanied by sanction threats are unacceptable, and undermine chances of reaching an agreement will be forced to respond including by implementing military technical measures in absence of US to negotiate legally binding security guarantees
Meanwhile Russia's Foreign Ministry website is down. That may be as a result of demand to see the letter from Putin. Foreign Ministry official says he cannot give reasons for the sites outage.
Once again, there is no forward progress between the sides.
US major indices have pushed to new session lows:
- Dow industrial average is down -366 points or -1.05% at 34568
- S&P index is down -52 points or -1.16% at 4423
- NASDAQ index is down 183 points or -1.3% of 13940
- Russell 2000 is down -21 points or -1.02% at 2058
European shares of also turn to the downside:
- German DAX, -0.6%
- France's CAC, -0.4%
- UK's FTSE 100, -1.0%
- Spain's Ibex, -0.6% Italy's FTSE MIB -0.7%
The price of gold has continued its move to the upside and is now trading up $24.30 or 1.3% at $1893.60.
Crude oil is trading around $92.
In the US debt market, yields continue to move to the downside on flight to safety flows. The tenure yield is now down -7.3 basis points while the 30 year is down -7.4 basis points.
The EURUSD has moved back down to retest its 100 hour moving average at 1.1351. So far the technical level has held, a break below should lead to more downside momentum.