Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprise suggestion on Sept. 5 that peacekeepers could be deployed to the Donbas was rightly met with skepticism about the Kremlin’s motives. Putin’s original proposal – that peacekeepers be deployed only along the front line between Ukrainian and Russian-led forces – seemed to be designed only to freeze the conflict in place on the Kremlin’s terms, rather than resolve it. This assessment was reinforced by the fact that Russia had previously sabotaged all efforts by Ukraine to bring a peacekeeping mission into the country.
But U.S. Special Envoy on Ukraine Kurt Volker, speaking in an interview with Politico Magazine published on Nov. 27, believes that the Russians may genuinely be seeking a way out of the Donbas quagmire they themselves created. The Russians, he said, are not getting what they wanted out of their military intervention in Ukraine, which was a pro-Russian, Russia-friendly country, with a government in Kyiv they could work with. In fact, they’ve got entirely the opposite: a more nationalist, Western-oriented and unified Ukraine than ever before.
Moreover, this blunder has come at great cost – and not only in terms of money and lives of Russian soldiers: Russia’s reputation in the West is ruined, its relationships with the United States and the European Union in tatters, and its economy suffering under the weight of sanctions.
However, if Volker is correct, it has taken three years for the Kremlin to get to the point of realizing it has botched things badly in Ukraine and needs to find a way out. And it still won’t even admit that it maintains forces in Ukraine, so how could it admit to withdrawing them?
The Kremlin has never made any concessions on Ukraine: The Minsk cease-fire never occurred – there is fighting on the front every day, and a Ukrainian soldier is killed on average every three days. The 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements were a sham – forced on Ukraine when Russia was in a position of strength, and were designed to weaken Ukraine further by forcing it to reabsorb Moscow’s fake “republics,” to act as a slow poison on the country’s politics and very sovereignty.
If Russia is really seeking an end to its war in the Donbas, it is the time for it to give up some ground, not just literally but figuratively – it must admit it is an active participant in the war, so that future negotiations between Volker and Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s point-man on Ukraine, can at least proceed on the basis of reality.
Meanwhile, sanctions against Russia must be maintained, and it must be made plain to the Kremlin that they will be reinforced if it continues to defy the international community and occupy parts of Ukraine, including Crimea.
