Putin’s refusal to negotiate sincerely prolongs the Ukraine war, using sham talks to stall peace while pursuing imperial ambitions.
LONDON: Will he? Won’t he? In the end he didn’t. Despite days of diplomatic manoeuvrings and psychological ploys, it became clear that President Vladimir Putin had decided not to meet up with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and possibly President Donald Trump around the negotiating table in Istanbul last Friday.
Hopes of such a meeting were boosted on Monday by a surprising late-night broadcast by Putin, when he proposed direct peacetalks on 16 May. According to the veteran Kremlin reporter, Andrei Kolesnikov, Putin concocted the speech himself without consulting his advisors, which led observers to conclude that he would be in Istanbul.
This encouraged Zelenskyy to announce that he would be there also for a face-to-face meeting, and Trump would detour to Istanbul en-route to Washington to also be at the meeting. If Putin failed to show up, said Zelenskyy, “the world would know who is the true obstacle to peace”. Days before Putin’s proposal for peace talks, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, accompanied by French President Macron and Germany’s newly installed chancellor, Friedrich Mertz, met up in Kyiv with Zelenskyy and had issued an ultimatum to Vladimir Putin.
Zelenskyy proposed a 30-day truce to start on 12 May which, if ignored by Russia, would be followed by devastating European sanctions. It now appears that Putin’s late night broadcast was a direct response to Zelenskyy’s pitch. In the end, the Russian delegation consisted largely of the same characters that Putin sent to Istanbul in the last round of talks in March and April 2022, shortly after he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It was headed by the former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, describe by some observers as a “notoriously dim-bulb 54-year-old Putin toady”, accompanied by the deputy defence minister, ColonelGeneral Alexander Fomin. The choice of Medinsky and Fomin is seen by many experts as no coincidence. Zelenskyy’s close adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, who was at the 2022 meeting, commented after the announcement that “they had no understanding of the country that they had invaded and of our resources.
They had no idea how to negotiate”. Recalling the meeting 3 years ago, Podolyak said “in those days we were willing to do almost anything to avoid more bloodshed, but we could not give away our right to defend ourselves. It seems that Putin wants to pick up precisely where his negotiations left off”. Seasoned observers, however, noted one big difference in the composition of the Kremlin team.
It now included the notorious General Igor Kostyukov, the head of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, a man who is under US, EU and UK sanctions for numerous activities. Kostyukov is charged with involvement in the Kremlin’s 2016 US presidential election interference, as well as the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury UK in 2018, cyber-attacks on critical European and American infrastructure, as well as his role in planning the 2014 annexation of Crimea. When Zelenskyy learned of Kostyukov’s addition, he had to be talked down from withdrawing from the Istanbul talks as a protest.
Had he done so, Zelenskyy would have shot himself in the foot as such a move would have defeated his chief purpose of proving without doubt to Donald Trump that it was Putin who is sabotaging the talks and not Kyiv. All this raises the question of whether or not Vladimir Putin really wants to end the war he started against Ukraine more than 3 years ago. After all, Russia’s economy is currently booming largely because of the war. Employment is high due to once-empty factories now working round the clock to support the war effort and most people are shielded from any effects of the invasion.
While democratic leaders would worry about approval ratings, Vladimir Putin has removed virtually all possible sources of domestic opposition and is free to focus on securing his place in Russian history. Since the early years of his reign, he has made no secret of the fact that he views the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and regards the post-Cold War order as an injustice. Crucially, Ukraine has come to embody both of these grievances. Putin firmly believes that he cannot possibly hope to achieve his historic mission of reversing the verdict of 1991 and reviving the Russian Empire without first extinguishing Ukrainian independence.
Once it became more and more obvious that the limited invasion of 2014 was not delivering the desired outcome of a pro-Russian Ukraine, Putin chose to raise the stakes by launching the largest European invasion since World War II. To many Ukrainians, Putin’s unprovoked attack was painfully familiar and is just the latest episode in a centuries-long campaign to divide and oppress their country.
Ukraine is a key borderland between Russia and the West, and following the rise of Russian nationalism in the 19th century, dominating Ukraine became the cornerstone of Russian policy. Moscow has long used genocidal tactics – such as killings, deportations, starvation and cultural destruction – to successfully crush Ukrainian efforts to chart an independent path. The difference this time, however, is that unlike in the past the people of Ukraine have been motivated by the rise of democracy in their nation and have overcome their deep internal divisions.
For the first time, Putin’s attack and Ukraine’s subsequent staunch resistance altered Kyiv’s relationship with Russia and has firmly united the Ukrainian people in favour of independence from Moscow. Putin recognises this danger and is determined to stick to his red lines which, if agreed, would in effect rip the state of Ukraine into shreds. He wants guarantees imposed on Kyiv: that Ukraine will never join NATO; that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate; and severe limitations be placed on the weapons it can possess.
Putin also insists that Crimea and the 4 eastern oblasts they claim as part of the Russian Federation be internationally recognised as such. All of this is completely unacceptable to Kyiv. To achieve his aim, Putin is therefore forcing his interlocutors deeper into a labyrinth of conditions and “root causes”, seeking to exhaust them and secure his main goals, or drive everything into an interminable back-and-forth. A classic Putin strategy, employed over and over again during his 25-year reign.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, however, hopes that the current period of frantic diplomacy and high-stakes gambits between his country and Russia will end with Donald Trump understanding that Vladimir Putin is the real obstacle to a peace deal. “Trump needs to believe that Putin actually lies. We should do our part and sensibly approach the issue to show that it’s not us but Putin who is slowing down the process”, he said to a group of journalists in Kyiv last week.
Wrapping up his Gulf tour, Donald Trump, who has repeatedly berated Zelenskyy and has never chastised the Russian leader, said on his flight back to Washington that nothing would happen regarding the conflict in Ukraine until he himself meets Putin. “Nothing’s going to happen until Putin and I get together” he told reporters. This will take time, according to Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov. “We of course agree with this (Trump’s) thesis”, he said on Friday, adding that such a meeting needed considerable advance preparation to ensure it was a success. “A summit must be set up”, said Peskov, “and it must be results oriented. A summit is always preceded by expert negotiations, consultations and long and intense preparations, especially if we are talking about a summit between the presidents of the Russian Federation and the United States of America”.
So, expect no serious discussions anytime soon. If a summit ever happens, and that’s a very big IF, it would be a long and drawn out affair between Russia and the US, cutting out Ukraine and it’s European allies. Donald Trump’s boast that he would solve the Ukraine war in a single day is a distant, and embarrassing, memory. The sham talks have ended and the war continues.
This is exactly how Vladimir Putin – the man who ordered the invasion – would like things to be. John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.