(CNN) — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s signal this week that he is open to peace talks should be viewed with ample caveats and the weight of Ukraine’s – and the West’s – past experience with Russian diplomacy.
There was a lot of fuss about the deal on Friday, in the same month that Moscow launched a third invasion of Ukraine from north of Kharkiv.
The Reuters news agency cited four sources, in a report by two deeply experienced and connected Russian reporters, that Moscow was willing to consider peace talks that would freeze the current Russian occupation of around a fifth of Ukraine.
Putin responded to that report by suggesting that Russia was willing to talk peace, based on previous agreements. He alluded to a failed deal in Istanbul just after the war began in 2022, which collapsed largely because Moscow’s forces continued to ravage Ukrainian territory and massacres around Kyiv had come to light.
The idea floated in the Reuters report would fall short of Moscow’s stated goal of capturing all of eastern Donetsk, but it would also eradicate Kyiv’s insistence that it must not give up any territory.
The context of Putin’s statements was key. They occurred during a visit to the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, something that in the past occurred moments before the Kremlin used Belarusian territory for military movements in Ukraine, while on Friday they took place during joint tactical nuclear weapons drills between both countries . Putin spoke of peace against a backdrop that was anything but.
Putin questioned the legitimacy of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Moscow has repeatedly lambasted, after Kyiv had to delay elections due to Putin’s own war. At the same time, there were unconfirmed reports that former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s private jet had landed in Belarus. The pro-Russian Yanukovych fled Ukraine in 2014 after forces loyal to him shot dead dozens of protesters in central Kyiv. The mere possibility of his presence while Putin and Lukashenko met led to speculation that Moscow was again plotting the return of a proxy to power in Ukraine.
Unconfirmed reports allege that Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine who was ousted by street protests and fled to Russia in 2014, has landed in Belarus. (Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters)
The Kremlin’s less brutal objective in Ukraine – short of a full or partial occupation – has involved a president in Kyiv whom Russia considers loyal, who will stop the country’s march toward the European Union and NATO. It was a fantasy before the 2022 invasion, and it emerged during the aborted 2022 Istanbul talks. But now it would probably take a Russian occupying force to impose it on a population inflamed by the Kremlin’s brutality.
So why talk about peace, especially when Russia appears to be experiencing its most successful moment on the front in months, if not since the invasion?
Diplomacy has always been a military tool for the Kremlin. He spoke of peace over Syria in 2015, while his planes bombed civilians in rebel-held areas. He spoke of peace in 2015 with Ukraine, while Russian troops and their proxies were in full assault against the strategic Ukrainian city of Debaltseve.
It is not cynical to distrust Russia’s sincerity when negotiating, but rather a practical necessity. Experience shows that he considers talks worthwhile if they unexpectedly produce a useful result without violence, or give his opponent reason to pause the fighting and try to broker an agreement.
It is also possible that Moscow will talk about peace again now for two reasons. First, Ukraine and its allies are calling a peace summit in Switzerland in June, where they will debate, without Russia, what kind of deal they could accept. The goal is likely to push for an exit that the Kremlin can take when its forces are finally militarily exhausted or in a stalemate.
Zelensky has said he hopes China – Russia’s most powerful ally, but which only partially supports it in the Ukraine war – will attend the summit. Putin may now talk about peace to suggest Beijing not engage in diplomacy over Russia without Russia being present. There is little serious chance that the Swiss summit will end the war, but it could solidify minds in the West as to the seriousness of the threat Moscow poses to a real peace deal, laying the foundations for the damage Ukraine could do. They must absorb their territorial integrity to stop the bloodshed.
Russian troops have taken advantage of the weakening of the front line in Ukraine and have advanced towards Kharkiv. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Friday that Putin’s insinuations about peace talks were directly aimed at sabotaging the summit. “Putin currently has no desire to end his aggression against Ukraine,” he wrote in X, adding that “this is why he is so afraid” of the Swiss summit.
Second, and more importantly, Putin is sending messages to Western governments and the current US presidential campaign. He is trying to quietly suggest – perhaps to populists in Europe, or to Trumpist Republicans in the United States – that a simple deal is at hand, one in which the fronts, in which Ukraine is currently losing with significant casualties, can be frozen. suddenly.
Western support for the war is costly, and increasingly unpopular – although the recent $61 billion approved by Congress may have given the issue a reprieve from being at the mercy of electoral opinion for about a year.
The Reuters report allows those in the West who want to see the war end to believe that the Kremlin could stop it, as it is, immediately. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov made the report sound as if it reflected Russia’s permanent position. But it may ultimately sound new and interesting to leading Western figures: Donald Trump – who has not explained how he would put into practice his claim that he could stop the war within 24 hours – and other NATO members less optimistic than France, the United Kingdom and the Baltic countries, on the need to never trust Russia at the negotiating table.
Putin is a pragmatist. He started the war thinking it would be easy. He continued her thinking that her tolerance for pain, his autocratic confidence, and his patience for victory would triumph. Maybe he’s right now. He now sees a moment of electoral weakness in the United States and European countries, to which he has responded with a vague and opaque signal that the time for diplomacy may have arrived.
It is likely to gain some traction among those who desperately want the war in Ukraine to just go away, and who are less aware of the existential threat that a victorious, hyper-militarized Moscow poses to NATO’s eastern members. But it should be seen through the lens of the deep cynicism of the diplomacy Moscow previously carried out in Syria and Ukraine: used as a moment to fiercely pursue the same military objectives, but against the illusory backdrop that peace could be just around the corner.
){kind=link}