Negotiation with Ukraine: Russia’s Real Breakthrough or Putin’s Diversion?
What is not said about the Russia-Ukraine negotiation. Federico Punzi's analysis for Atlantico newspaper
Yes, the resistance that for some was useless, indeed even irresponsible, consisting in sending their army and the Ukrainian people towards a certain massacre, given the overwhelming Russian military superiority, is instead proving decisive in allowing Kiev to obtain in best case scenario, a real negotiation, which safeguards its sovereignty, at worst to catch your breath and crystallize positions on the ground that are certainly critical, but without any breakthroughs on the Russian side.
After the blitz on the capital to decapitate the Ukrainian political and military leaders, Moscow seems to have redirected its objectives at the moment. But the suspicion is that the negotiations may be a way to buy time, given the difficulties encountered, to reorganize and resume the large-scale offensive in the south-east of the country. In this hypothesis, we would not be facing the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. Only the first phase of the war would have ended, with the capture of Mariupol and the closure of a land corridor between Crimea and Russia, to concentrate in a second phase on the complete "liberation" of Donbass and the capture of Odessa (for the control of the entire Black Sea coast).
On the diplomatic level, for a couple of weeks the Ukrainian President Zelensky has hinted that he is ready to negotiate the neutrality of Kiev, renouncing NATO entry in exchange for security guarantees, so the news of yesterday's talks in Istanbul are you come from the Russian side.
Chief negotiator Medinsky announced Moscow's decision to "drastically reduce military activities in the direction of Kiev and Chernihiv", in order to "increase mutual trust in view of future negotiations to agree and sign a peace agreement with Ukraine. ". In reality, the Russian forces around Kiev and Chernihiv had been at a standstill for days, and indeed in retreat before the Ukrainian counter-offensives. "The threat to Kiev is not over", however, warns Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, "no one should be fooled". And US officials see the move only as a change of strategy.
The real surprise was the Russian openness to Ukraine's accession to the European Union: "The Russian Federation has received written proposals from Ukraine confirming its desire for a neutral and non-nuclear status," said Medinsky. . The renunciation of entry into NATO, of hosting foreign bases, of the production and deployment on its territory of any kind of weapons of mass destruction, he specified. "The Kiev proposals imply that, for its part, the Russian Federation has no objection to Ukraine's desire to join the European Union," added the Russian chief negotiator.
By "neutrality" Moscow would no longer also mean Kiev's non-membership of the EU. If confirmed at the highest levels, it would be a surprising turning point in the Russian position, considering that precisely the path towards the EU (and not NATO, as the vulgate of our Putin-Versteher would like) had been the casus belli of the 2013 crisis. -2014, of Euromaidan and the consequent first Russian invasion. We will come back to that later in this article.
Therefore, if this were the point of collapse of the negotiations, Ukraine will not be able to enter NATO, it will not have foreign bases and chemical or nuclear weapons on its territory, but in exchange it will be able to enter the EU. For its part, Moscow would renounce the so-called "denazification", which was none other than the overthrow of Zelensky and his replacement by a pro-Russian puppet government. More complicated to unravel the knot of the definitive status of Crimea and Donbass, already in fact in Russian hands, on which there is no progress. It is likely that separate negotiations will take place on these territories, as Moscow is guaranteed by a fait accompli.
But in exchange for renouncing NATO membership, the Ukrainians are also asking for a system of security guarantees. In fact, in Kiev they realize the trap that lies behind the apparently harmless principle of "neutrality" and that they need concrete guarantees against future attacks on sovereignty and integrity. A neutrality that was "guaranteed" only by Moscow, which had already broken his word, to the commitments signed in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and with today's invasion, would not be true neutrality but constant threat, hence submission.
This is why Kiev is asking third countries to guarantee its security, first and foremost the United States, the United Kingdom and Turkey. With concrete commitments, more stringent than those envisaged in the aforementioned memorandum, which did not avoid Russian aggression. "The guaranteeing countries will have to provide us with armed forces, weapons and closed skies," the negotiators clarified yesterday. This is very different from the provisions of Article 5 NATO: these guarantees would in fact trigger only in defense of Ukraine, if attacked, while they would in no way imply the participation of Kiev alongside the guaranteeing countries in a possible conflict against Russia.
"We will continue our negotiations with Russia but we will also involve the guaranteeing countries," said Ukrainian chief negotiator Mikhaylo Podolyak. The problem now is to understand how far the guaranteeing countries will want to go with their commitments. Will they give credible guarantees, that is, such as to dissuade Moscow from new aggressions? And for its part, will Moscow want to deprive itself of the military threat against Kiev, knowing that this time it would go to war with the guaranteeing countries?
We are not yet at this stage, but when the countries called by Kiev to provide guarantees, the United States and some European countries, will respond, thus also entering into the negotiations, it is reasonable to assume that the Russian side will make a request to revoke or lighten sanctions, which Washington seems unwilling to do. How will the Biden administration respond? And the European allies?
On the Russian side in Istanbul "positive signs", commented President Zelensky on Telegram, but "of course we see all the risks and we see no reason to trust the words of some representatives of a state that continues to fight for our destruction. Ukrainians are not naive people. They have already understood, during these 34 days of invasion and in the last eight years of war in the Donbass, that only a concrete result can be trusted ”.
Skepticism even in Washington. "I would leave it to our Ukrainian partners to define whether there is real progress and whether Russia is making a significant commitment," said US Secretary of State Blinken, adding however: "I can say this: there is what the Russia says and what Russia does. We are focused on the second thing ”. And he does not see "signs that Russia is really getting serious in the negotiations." Blinken also speculated that they could be exploited by Moscow to regroup its military forces. "I can't tell you if these statements reflect a reorientation on eastern and southern Ukraine, or if this is a means by which Russia is trying to deflect and deceive."
If the final outcome is a neutrality of Kiev that includes possible accession to the EU and the maintenance of its own army, and adequate guarantees at least from the US, for Putin it will be a defeat, which he will hardly be able to present to his followers as a victory by flaunting only the renunciation of entry into NATO, the Donbass and the Crimea (which in fact it already had), in the face of the extremely high costs suffered in economic terms.
(Extract from an article published on atlanticoquotidiano.it)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/negoziato-con-lucraina-vera-svolta-della-russia-o-diversivo-di-putin/ on Thu, 31 Mar 2022 07:54:22 +0000.