BRUSSELS – Ukraine and Russia are engaged in sporadic negotiations to end a brutal war, which is now in its third week. But despite the signs of progress, Western officials have little optimism that the talks have reached a dangerous stage or even that they have faced the toughest issues.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has raised hopes with his recent statements seeming to accept that his country will not be part of NATO, despite the alliance’s promise in 2008 to accept that one day, and despite a three-year amendment to Ukraine’s constitution. Just before to make membership in both NATO and the European Union national goals.
Some form of neutrality for Ukraine without NATO membership appears to satisfy a major Russian demand, though only one of them. Ukrainians say any form of neutrality must be accompanied by security guarantees against further Russian aggression. But who would provide such guarantees, and if some of the guarantors were members of NATO, and how that would be fundamentally different from actual membership in the alliance, are just some of the basic outstanding questions.
Mr. Zelensky said on Wednesday that neutrality must include credible guarantees that protect Ukraine from future threats. “We can and must defend our state, our life, our Ukrainian life,” he said. We can and must negotiate a just but just peace for Ukraine, and real security guarantees will work. Patience is required.
But Moscow also demanded that Ukraine accept the loss of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and accept a large part of the country in the east – the entire Donetsk and Luhansk regions, parts of which are occupied by Russian-backed separatists. – To become independent republics, as decided by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine rejects such a partition of its country, so now it is difficult to see where to find a middle ground.
As a senior NATO official suggested, negotiations only succeed, as they recently did in Bosnia, when the conflict reaches a stalemate or one side wins. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is yet ready to stop the fighting – Russia in its quest to seize the coast of Ukraine, the main cities and the capital, Kyiv; Or Ukraine for resistance. Even if Russia’s progress has slowed, Mr. Putin gives no indication that his military or political goals have changed.
Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken said Thursday that the United States sees no indication that Putin is willing to halt his military efforts.
“From where I’m sitting, diplomacy obviously requires the engagement of both sides in good faith to de-escalate,” he said. “The actions we see Russia taking every day, almost every minute of every day, are in complete contrast to any serious diplomatic effort to end the war.”
Various countries are making efforts to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, most notably Turkey and Israel, which are generally seen as less strained in relations with both countries than Germany and France, which have also tried to make overtures with Mr. Putin. But efforts for a basic and temporary ceasefire for civilians to escape the fighting around cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol have been difficult to achieve.
On Friday, it was Mr. Putin who complained in a call with German Chancellor Olaf Schulz that Ukraine was “trying to delay the negotiation process by putting forward new unrealistic proposals” and accused Ukraine of war crimes.
Mr. Putin said Russia was “ready to propose a search for solutions in line with its well-known principled approaches” in the fourth round of talks. But even a negotiated ceasefire seems out of reach, let alone a lasting peace.
So far, according to a senior Ukrainian official, Russia’s demands are mostly unacceptable.
In essence, he said, Russia demands that the Verkhovna Rada vote to enshrine the country’s neutrality, downgrade its army to 50,000 soldiers or less, pledge not to host any foreign military bases, and accept Russian sovereignty in Crimea and the independence of the entire territory. Donbass region, which includes Donetsk and Luhansk.
Only then, the official said, would Russia agree to withdraw from other lands it had already occupied.
The official said Ukraine would not agree to anything unless Russia withdraws its forces first, or to an army of such small size, which represents less than a quarter of its permanent pre-war strength. But he said he was willing to accept some form of demilitarized zone of about 50 to 100 kilometers on both sides of the border.
Ukrainians also want an international peacekeeping force in Ukraine, with its sovereignty guaranteed — not simply “guaranteed,” as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum suggested, in which the country agreed to give up its nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union. And they want those security guarantees signed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council – the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia – as well as Turkey and Germany.
This would oblige key members of NATO to fight for Ukraine in the event that Russia (or any other country) invades it. The senior NATO official said that given that NATO is not ready to fight Russian forces in Ukraine now, or even create a no-fly zone over Ukraine at the risk of fighting with Russia, it is hard to imagine that such guarantees could be agreed upon.
Even on the subject of neutrality, there are enough complications that go beyond the idea of amending the constitution. Russia’s presidential spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has proposed Austria as a model for Ukrainian neutrality. Austrian officials briefed Ukrainian officials on this, according to a senior Western diplomat. But given that Austria has no restrictions on the size of its military forces, it is unlikely that its model will be acceptable to Russia.
Turkey is making its own mediation efforts. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu traveled from Moscow to Lviv for separate talks with the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers this week. Expressing hope for progress on the ceasefire, he held a phone conversation on Thursday between Mr. Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Another view of Russia’s demands emerged from that conversation. According to Erdogan’s top aide and spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, who was on the call, Putin is also insisting that Russian again become an official language in Ukraine and on what he calls “De-Nazification” from the country.
Mr. Kalin He told the BBC This last request may be an attack on Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish and lost his family in the Holocaust, it may be enough for Ukraine to pledge to condemn neo-Nazis and crackdown on some far-right nationalist groups to fulfill he-she.
Mr. Kalin said the second category of demands was more difficult for Ukraine, and involved a territorial settlement, but he did not specify them.
The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said in Moscow on Friday that on the issue of disarmament, the two sides were “in the middle of the road”, but did not disclose details.
A senior Western diplomat, who was briefed on the talks, suggested that neutrality and giving up Crimea would be easier for Ukraine than other demands of Russia, such as further eastern partition and disarmament. The diplomat confirmed that Mr. Putin appeared willing to speak with Mr. Zelensky, who appears to be trying to prepare the Ukrainians for an eventual deal.
If true, Putin’s desire to speak to Mr. Zelensky, who had originally demanded his removal, is a form of progress. This is also an acknowledgment that the current Russian team negotiating with Ukraine is low-level and has little power to settle the toughest issues. So peace seems a long way off.
Stephen Erlanger Reported from Brussels and Patrick Kingsley From Tbilisi, Georgia. Shafak Timur Contributed to reporting from Istanbul.
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