The peace talks and Putin's real aspirations behind them

As the envoys moved forward in the peace talks on Tuesday, Russia offered concessions that pointed to a more realistic course for the war in Ukraine, while stating that nor is it in a hurry to end the conflict, according to diplomats and analysts.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin presented the decision to “drastically reduce” military activity around the Ukrainian capital Kiev and the northern city of Chernihiv as a gesture “to increase mutual trust for future negotiations.”

But Russia's advance in the north had already stalled, with troops around Kiev taking defensive positions in the face of Ukrainian counterattacks, both there and near Sumy, where Russia has struggled to encircle the main Ukrainian army east of the Dnieper River.

“De-escalation is a euphemism for withdrawal,” said Lawrence Freedman, professor emeritus of War Studies at King's College London. “Russia is adjusting its objectives to reality, because the war is quite empirical,” he said. “It's not a trick to say they're concentrating on the Donbas, because it's really all they can do.”

But the withdrawal is not a surrender, and others warned that the progress made on Tuesday does not mean that Russia is ready to engage in serious talks about ending the war. That would require a better result for Russian President Vladimir V. Putin to sell it at home as a victory.

On Tuesday, Ukrainians outlined a 15-year process of negotiations on the status of Crimea, saying that control of the Donbas region could be discussed at meetings between Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Russia has said that it would only schedule a meeting between the two presidents when a draft peace agreement was ready.

Some analysts say that such an agreement would have, at a minimum, to give Russia control of Mariupol, the besieged port city in Ukraine that still resists in some way, in order to create a safe land route between two areas Russia occupies: Crimea, to the west, and the Donbas, to the east. And also, they say, it would have to give up control over the two administrative regions of the Donbas, Luhansk and Donetsk, which Putin has already declared as independent republics.

“Russia is not in a position to negotiate seriously because it has to do better in the war,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst at the Foundation for Strategic Research. “This is an opportunity for the Russians to consolidate, to regroup, to withdraw from places beyond their logistical reach, where they have already run out of food and ammunition.”

Some senior Western officials agreed, saying that the Russians were very short of artillery shells and other ammunition and needed to be replenished.

Nor will Putin end the war easily, Heisbourg said. If he takes the area east of the Dnieper, “it may be enough for now, but he will rebuild his army and continue.”

For both sides, said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, London's research institution, “the negotiations are not serious, in the sense that negotiations now for both sides are a continuation of the war, not a solution.” Russia can focus on the east, and Ukraine will find it difficult to move from its agile defense to serious counterattacks, he said. “And Putin has not forgotten Kiev.”

Even if Putin can control and “settle” for another partition of Ukraine in the east, “Ukraine has to sign it, and if not, I don't think we'll lift the sanctions,” Niblett said.

His colleague, Mathieu Boulègue, a French academic studying the Russian army, agrees that Russia is not negotiating in good faith, but “testing the ground and requesting time, to regroup and reequip itself militarily and make more profits on the ground.”

The Russian military seems to have taken control of what could be called phase 2 of a botched operation, he said, which should have been phase 1. Taking Mariupol, the land bridge and the Donbas “would have been the adult military plan”. Modern warfare is half the information war, Boulègue said, “and success is what you make of it,” especially in a repressive media environment like the one that exists now in Russia.

The inability of Russian forces to capture cities and maintain territory is evident after a month, he said, “so the strategic objectives have had to change.”

But to completely withdraw from Kiev would allow Ukrainians to strengthen the Donbas region and give them a significant victory, Michael Kofman, director of Russian Studies at CNA, a defense research institution in Virginia, suggested in a tweet.

On a trip to Morocco, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken also questioned Russia's promise to reduce hostilities. “There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does,” he said on Tuesday. “We focused on the latter. And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalization of Ukraine and its people and that continues as we speak.”

Russia did not stop fighting after the annexation of Crimea in 2015, but actively supported separatists in the Donbas, said Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Russia and head of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform. “I am skeptical that the Russians will abandon the war,” he said. “We have already seen this film in 2014 and 2015. I see this only as a pause.”

Ian Garner, a historian of Russian propaganda, noted on Twitter that “Putin's Russia - in fact, post-Soviet Russia - has been involved in dirty and endless conflicts for years,” citing Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia in Georgia and the Donbas, all areas in other countries where Russian forces support separatist movements. “They're not finished, maybe,” he said, but “in the intermission.”

The main Ukrainian negotiator, Mykhailo Podolyak, suggested after Tuesday's talks that the two sides were talking seriously about Ukraine's neutrality, a treaty that would ensure its security by NATO member states such as the United States, Britain, Turkey, France and Germany, a ceasefire and humanitarian corridors.

Ukrainian and Western officials also suggested that Russia would be willing for a demilitarized Ukraine to join the European Union, as long as it renounced joining NATO or hosting any foreign force.

But security analysts questioned the sincerity of the agreement.

Bond said that the problem with Ukraine's notion of neutrality is that so far none of the countries that want to guarantee it would agree to do so. It would be like joining NATO with collective defense by another name, so it is highly unlikely, he said.

As for accession to the European Union, Niblett said, that would pose the greatest danger to Putin, who helped spur the 2014 revolt in Ukraine when he forced then-president Viktor Yanukovich to renege on a trade agreement with the bloc. If Ukraine were to join now, Niblett said, the country would develop economically even faster, in contrast to Russia, “and you would end up with a South Korea next to a North Korea, and I can't see Putin accepting that.”

In addition, he said, the treaties of the European Union also contain a promise of collective defence.

Even so, Boulègue said, the European Union must give Ukraine a clear answer on its prospects for accession. “It is not Russia who must decide whether that leads to EU membership or not,” he said. “But the EU has to be absolutely clear about the future of Ukraine for the future, that is what needs to be done from a moral point of view.”

(C) The New York Times.-

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