How negotiations that could have brought peace failed

On April 19, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Russian press that he is ready to negotiate with Ukraine “not just for the sake of show”, but not with President Volodymyr Zelensky. “We are totally convinced that we must continue the special military operation. We indicate that we are ready for negotiations not just for the show. This is the truth, but talks with Zelensky do not make sense for several reasons,” Lavrov said.

In the first weeks of the war in Ukraine it seemed that the regime in Kiev had no chance of standing against Russia. Apart from the formal condemnations of the Russian invasion, the West has offered nothing to the Zelenski regime, as if waiting to see if the army reformed since 2014, if the secret services purged, the politicians purged with the help of anti-corruption bodies and Western NGOs will resist the assault.

What happened on the front is relatively clear. But less clear are the diplomatic initiatives of Kiev and Moscow in the early months of the war, initiatives that came close to bringing about a cease-fire agreement and a treaty on Ukraine’s neutrality.

The first contacts between Russia and Ukraine began on February 28, 2022, in Belarus, with the mediation of President Alexander Lukashenko. By April, after negotiations in Istanbul, Russia and Ukraine had taken important steps towards an agreement, but in May, negotiations broke down. What happened? How far has it come on the way to ending the war? And why was the deal not completed?

An article signed by Samuel Charap, from the Rand Corporation, published by Foreign Affairs tries to answer these questions. The author interviewed several officials involved in the negotiations and also had access to documents during the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations. Its conclusion is not at all favorable to Ukraine – neither at the time of 2022 nor now, after more than two years of war: Ukraine’s Western partners did not want to make new commitments to ensure Ukraine’s security, which suggests that the prospect of accession Ukraine in NATO was and is non-existent. Second, the negotiations seem to have failed because Moscow and Kiev wanted too much too fast at that time.

In March 2022, after several weeks of negotiations, Russia ended up renouncing the immediate capitulation of Ukraine and insisting only on the country’s neutrality and “denazification”. On the other hand, Ukraine abandoned its own condition of Russia’s capitulation and insisted more on the security guarantees offered by the great powers. These guarantees were to be different from those in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine gave up its Soviet nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees from Russia, the US and Britain. The great shortcoming of the Budapest Memorandum was that the signatories only undertook to refer to the UN Security Council in the event of aggression against Ukraine, without being obliged to defend Ukraine.

Natfali Bennett, the prime minister of Israel at the time of the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in Istanbul and one of the mediators, was widely quoted as saying that the failure of these talks was due to Western pressure on the Zelenski regime. Bennett shows, for Foreign Affairs, that Volodymyr Zelensky was extremely insistent on security guarantees.

Rand Corporation researcher Samuel Charap obtained the full text of the communique of a round of negotiations that took place in Istanbul in mid-March 2022, the skeleton of the potential Russian-Ukrainian agreement – “Key Provisions of the Treaty on Security Guarantees for Ukraine “.

– Ukraine was to renounce any intention to join military alliances, to have military bases and foreign troops, foreign weapons (including nuclear weapons) on the national territory;

– The guarantor powers were to be the permanent members of the UN Security Council (including Russia), plus Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland and Turkey;

– All guarantor states would have been obliged, after consultations with Ukraine and after consultations among themselves, to provide military assistance, weapons, impose a no-fly zone and send their own armed forces to Ukraine, should the country be a was attacked. These obligations would have been stronger than those provided by Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. (In a round of negotiations in mid-April, Russia tried to water down this article, insisting that a possible military intervention should have taken place “on the basis of the decision agreed by all guarantor states”, so that Moscow, the most likely invader, to have veto power).

– guarantor states (including Russia) undertake to facilitate Ukraine’s accession to the EU. It is a remarkable provision, because in 2013 the Putin regime pressured former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych not to sign the EU association agreement.

– Russia and Ukraine stipulated that the dispute over Crimea would be resolved within the next 10-15 years, a provision suggesting that Russia was willing to negotiate the status of Crimea, which was already annexed.

– A denazification process would have taken place in Ukraine, which Foreign Affairs writes that, in Russia’s view, meant the removal of the Zelensky regime.

– The size of the Ukrainian Army was the subject of fierce negotiations. Ukraine insisted on a peacetime army of 250,000, while Russia insisted on 80,000. Ukraine insisted on 800 tanks, while Russia on 340. Ukraine aimed for a missile arsenal with a minimum range of 280 km, while Russia would not accept more than 40 km. Range.

– Territorial aspects were to be discussed directly by presidents Putin and Zelenski.

The above draft treaty was abandoned, the negotiations having failed. Russian propaganda claims that Zelenskiy was persuaded by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to abandon the deal and continue the war. False, writes Foreign Affairs. Western propaganda claims that Zelenski gave up negotiations after the discovery of the Bucea massacre (at the beginning of April), after the withdrawal of Russian troops near Kiev, at the end of March. False, writes Foreign Affairs, pointing out that talks continued more than a month after the gruesome discovery.

Then why were the negotiations abandoned? Because, says a former American official quoted by Foreign Affairs, the regime in Kiev did not consult with Washington before drafting the communiqué mentioned above. The treaty would have created an obligation for the US to intervene militarily in Ukraine, most likely against Russia, and this was unacceptable to Washington. Under these conditions, how sincere and realistic are the recent promises of NATO (ie the US) regarding Ukraine’s accession to the Alliance?

“The negotiations failed because the negotiators put the chariot of the post-war security order ahead of the end of the actual conflict. Essential issues of conflict management (humanitarian corridors, ceasefire, troop withdrawal) were omitted, but an overly ambitious long-term peace treaty was attempted instead. To be fair, Ukraine and the West also tried the mirror version, through the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015, when they discussed in detail the ceasefire and the withdrawal of weapons“, writes Foreign Affairs. It should be remembered that former Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk format negotiations were a way for the West to buy time to strengthen Ukraine’s army and prepare it for full-scale war.

“The communiqué spoke of a multilateral framework that would have required the West to engage diplomatically with Russia and take into account real security guarantees for Ukraine. Neither of these issues was a priority for the United States and its allies at the time“, Foreign Affairs also writes about the causes of the failure of negotiations at the beginning of 2022. In other words, the US and some of its NATO allies did not want the war in Ukraine to last a month (as many interstate conflicts have lasted postwar). Ukraine was not the only stake in the war that had just begun: the Nord Stream pipeline had not yet been mined, Germany and the rest of the European allies had not given up economic relations with Russia, had not yet felt the war effort and large contributions to NATO and the US military industry, Emmanuel Macron’s France is still flirting with the idea of ​​negotiations with Vladimir Putin, certainly not with the idea of ​​sending troops for operations in Ukraine, as is happening now. The war had to last not only to weaken Russia’s army and economy, but also to remind Europe “who is the boss” and to rally the old continent for the new confrontations of America.

And the war will continue. The $60 billion in aid that passed the big hop in the US House of Representatives may secure Ukrainian defensive positions and reinforce calls for war by neoconservatives in US politics, the media and the think tank environment, such as the Kagan-Nuland family (who control the for the Study of War) and the Applebaum-Sikorski family (the current Foreign Minister of Poland). In an article published by The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes that the US must urgently pressure its allies in Europe to seize $300 billion in Russian assets and send them to Ukraine, because there are “legal and moral arguments excellent” for this.

“The war won’t end until the Russians don’t want to fight anymore, and that will happen when they realize they can’t win. Now it’s our turn to convince them, and the circle of pro-Russian politicians in America, that the invasion will not succeed. The best way to do that is to believe in ourselves,” Applebaum writes.

To such a war cry, the best response seems to be that of a Jew involved in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine: “It’s a joke about a guy who was trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to passers-by.” “Would America give you guarantees? Will he commit that, years from now, if Russia attacks, he will send troops to Ukraine? After he withdrew from Afghanistan and beyond? Volodymyr, this will not happen,” says former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about a discussion with the Ukrainian president in 2022.