WASHINGTON, D.C. — America’s special representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker, on his way to Kyiv for meetings with President Petro Poroshenko and a visit to the Donbas on May 14, didn’t sound very optimistic when he gave a briefing in Washington, D.C., on May 8 entitled “Ending the war in Ukraine.”
Volker has been waiting for more than three months for a reply from his Russian counterpart, Vladislav Surkov, about U.S. and Western plans to break the bloody impasse in the conflict by drafting in a United Nations-mandated peacekeeping force to provide security throughout the parts of eastern Ukraine occupied by Moscow.
The departure of regular Russian and Kremlin-backed forces and their replacement by U.N. peacekeepers to avoid a security vacuum, according to Volker, is the prerequisite to holding transparent elections in the occupied territory that would then enable the implementation of the 2015 Minsk agreements.
The much-criticized Minsk agreement, signed by Russia and Ukraine, is still the best hope for achieving an end to the conflict, believes Volker. But he said unless it is adhered to Ukraine can’t implement the political steps in its commitments about giving special status to Donbas inhabitants, amnesties for crimes committed by pro-Moscow groups, and thrashing out arrangements for reincorporating the areas back under Ukrainian government.
Throughout his talk at the Dirksen U.S. Senate building near the Capitol, Volker made it clear he blamed Russia for the continuing bloodshed in Ukraine, for breaching the Minsk agreements and trying to portray it as a “frozen conflict.”
“I’ve been very clear to describe it as a hot war because so often it is relegated to the status of frozen conflict and therefore unimportant in some way,” he said. “But that’s simply untrue. It’s an active conflict. There’s fighting going on every day.”
He said the conflict was “100 hundred percent” created and funded by Moscow and that the puppet Donbas and Luhansk “republics” were entirely controlled by the Kremlin and their armed groups, led by persons he describe as “regular Russian officers embedded at every level of the terrorist forces.”
By contrast, he described the Ukrainian army: “These are soldiers of a country fighting to defend themselves on the territory of their own country.”
Volta hasn’t talked to Surkov in more than three months, when the U.S. rejected a Russian initiative to place a UN protection force along the confrontation line in the Donbas. Serkov, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top aides, is credited with being the “mastermind” who urged Putin to annex Crimea and then invade mainland Ukraine in 2014.
Volker explained that the US, the EU and the rest of the West saw the Russian proposal as a ruse to solidify the division of Ukraine along the line of conflict.
He said: “Russia proposed in September last year a protection force to protect OSCE (Organization for Security an Cooperation in Europe) monitors only on the cease-fire line dividing the territory of Ukraine. Everyone immediately saw that this would only further deepen the conflict, divide the territory and make it essentially unresolvable.”
He said the U,S. and other Western powers coordinated to quash the Russian proposal and came up with a plan to introduce a genuine peacekeeping force.
Volker said the the new proposal did not call for a U.N.-run operation but rather a U.N.-mandated peacekeeping force which would be staffed by volunteer contributions from various nations and coordinated by a special representative of the U.N. secretary-general.
The Minsk peace process, he said, couldn’t move forward until such a peacekeeping force established control of the international border between Ukraine and Russia to create conditions for free elections and other key parts of the agreement.
Volker said many countries, without naming whic, had privately said they were prepared to become involved “under the right circumstances.”
He said: “A U.N. security council resolution would, of course, only pass if Russia was willing to vote in favor. Which means this is designed to be a proposal that will only work if Russia supported it and is in agreement with wanting to solve the conflict. If Russia wants to keep fighting, wants to obstruct peace then no one is going to put ground forces there.”
Volker believes that Russia has nothing to gain from continuing the conflict, since there won’t be recognition of territory taken by invasion and Moscow will only suffer more in terms of sanctions and lost lives.
“The Ukrainian people have shown an extraordinary resilience and the situation has in fact reinforced a sense of national identity and purpose in Ukraine, he said, “And I don’t see that changing as long as the conflict goes on. In fact it will deepen.”
Volker has been instrumental in boosting Ukraine’s “resilience” because he was a key U.S. official in advocating the provision of lethal weapons to the country.
Volker visited the Russian-occupied territories soon after he was appointed in July 2017, and recommended the U.S. supply Ukraine with the Javelin anti-armor missiles it had been pleading for since the start of the war in 2014.
Earlier this month a $47 million military-aid package, approved last year, of 210 Javelin missiles and 37 launchers, arrived in Ukraine, something which has enraged the Kremlin.
Violker said that Javelins would make it more difficult for Russia to press into Ukraine and would increase the cost in terms of lives and materiel for its military, although he doesn’t doubt Moscow has the ability to do it.
He said Moscow shouldn’t complain about Ukraine receiving the sophisticated hand-held missiles, “These are weapons that Ukraine has purchased and put into storage. Why is Ukraine’s possession of these remarkable? This is what every country does. These are defensive weapons. They are very useful if you have a tank coming at you.”
But Volker said he has not seen any signs that Moscow is willing to engage “seriously” to resolve the conflict. “In fact if you look at the wider context of Russia’s activities, whether globally or in respect to the United States, it’s been a very disappointing several months. We saw the nerve agent attack in the U.K., we saw the expulsion of diplomats and breaking of official ties, we saw an attack by Russian contract soldiers on U.S. and other forces in Syria, we saw campaign videos of Russia’s new cruise missile, the renewal of their nuclear capacity, an animated [cartoon] version of a strike on Florida.”
Volker hadn’t expected to make much progress in his talks during the months leading up to the Russian presidential election when Putin couldn’t tarnish his strongman image by even hinting at a withdrawal from Ukraine. Volker hopes that after Putin’s inauguration on May 7, he will receive “a constructive response” to the U.N. peacekeeper plan.
But he’s not holding his breath and said: “If none of that happens, our Plan A is still Plan A: We want to see Ukraine become a successful, prosperous and secure democracy. We want to see Ukraine develop as a country, we want to see the best possible opportunities for Ukrainian people. We’ve been providing assistance to Ukraine in a number of ways as have countries in Europe and we will continue to do that.”
He said that crucially Ukraine had to do its share as well. Although he praised Ukraine for having done an “awful lot” since 2014 to address corruption and strengthen institutions, Volker said he understood how difficult it is to reform “a system that has become endemically corrupt and endemically controlled by a small number of oligarchs…there have been some steps but the process has fallen short.”
A key test of reforms in the judicial system to fight corruption would be “if foreign investors are confident to invest money in Ukraine to create jobs and prosperity”. The stronger Ukraine’s economy and democratic institutions became, the better Ukraine would be able to defend herself, he said.
Volker believes that Ukraine is pivotal in determining whether all countries respect each other and their right to determine their own future or a darker, nastier system that Moscow is testing out.
He said: “Russia has torn up the rules as in the case of Ukraine and that has very injurious consequences [to world order]. If you do that here, then where else do you do it? What certainty will people have about security in the future?”
He said that America’s and other Western countries’ support for Kyiv is “partly about Ukraine” but the aim is “trying to re-establish the fundamentals of the world order so we can have some confidence in the future – I think that’s the important thing.”
