This Friday, Russia published an ultimatum to the United States and its partners in the NATO military alliance, detailing its conditions to reduce tension in the crisis centered on Ukraine.
The demands were known, but posted on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry with a request for negotiations to start in Geneva this Saturday (18), they gained a tone that mixes drama and farce.
Dramatic because, with about 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, Russia has alarmed the West about the risk of an invasion that President Vladimir Putin says he has no intention of leading. He points to increasing Western military activity and the supply of weapons to Kiev as the reason for his actions.
The risk of something going wrong in such a situation is always enormous, all the more so with the hostile climate in areas occupied by pro-Russian rebels in the east of the country. This Friday, a Kiev soldier was killed in a border skirmish with separatists, joining the perhaps 14,000 victims of the now-deadly civil war there.
The farcical part of the story is the certainty that even Moscow does not believe the demands it has placed on US diplomacy this week. In short, Putin wants the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance to withdraw proposals made in 2008 to join the club from Ukraine and Georgia — and, for that matter, from any other former Soviet state whose territory serves as a buffer between Western and Russian forces.
This is the strategic priority that Putin wants to achieve, a point reinforced by his wars in Georgia itself, in 2008, and in Ukraine, in 2014.
NATO has already rejected the terms, but it can give in in practice, and that appears to be what the Russian is betting on. Another condition is unacceptable to Westerners: withdrawing all weaponry from states that entered the alliance after May 1997.
That is, precisely those ex-communists and ex-Soviets who joined the West at a time of Russian strategic weakness, in the chaos that followed the extinction of the regime in Moscow in 1991. Among them, aggressive Poland and the three vital Baltic States, which border Russia directly and spent much of the 20th century occupied by the Kremlin.
There is no chance of that happening. One item can be agreed upon, if negotiated: the commitment not to install missiles with intermediate-range nuclear capability in Europe, those that were banned by a treaty abandoned by the US in 2019.
In practice, little changes: Russia has its installed in the Kaliningrad enclave and the Crimea, according to reports, and NATO may place them far from borders or rely on weapons with longer ranges.
The question of “how many minutes it takes to reach Moscow” has a more psychological effect than it does in the end. What matters, from the Russian point of view, is to prevent Kiev, Tbilisi and other capitals from having NATO commands and troops in their respective countries, as this is perceived as a strategic threat.
With the Europeans somewhat stunned, that leaves the US. The White House, according to anonymous information leaked to the American press, obviously did not like the tone because it expected to discuss the Russian terms next week. He already said that there are unacceptable things, of course, but that if there is a reduction in tension, it will be easier to talk.
Officially, President Joe Biden’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, kept her tone harsh and said Russia could “expect a high price to pay” if it invaded Ukraine. Russian Vice Chancellor Dmitri Riabkov told reporters that there was no deadline for talks, but that they could “happen tomorrow” (Saturday).
What comes next is still uncertain. Moscow Carnegie Center director Dmitri Tremin tweeted that the Kremlin released the terms because it knows they are unreachable. A pessimist, he believes Putin can try to resolve the situation by force.
How this would happen is uncertain. In 2014, the Russians annexed Crimea shortly after Kiev saw the pro-Moscow government toppled. In doing so, they helped prevent Ukrainian accession to Western structures, NATO at the head, which do not accept countries with active territorial disputes.
In addition, in Crimea is the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, the main force of Russian projection towards the Mediterranean. The base, in Sevastopol, had been leased for decades — but it could run the risk of being in a NATO country, something also undesirable for the Kremlin.
Support for pro-Russian rebels in the east was not so decisive, not least because the cost of yet another annexation was perhaps priceless — and the area known as the Donbass was less ethnically cohesive in Russian than the absorbed peninsula.
With his men, tanks and missiles, Putin mixes truco elements into his chess. As in cards, you are raising the bet every round, bluff or not. He had even made the military move in April, only to back down when he saw Kiev shunned from a rehearsal to retake the Donbass. There’s a price for that, too.
More objective signaling came from Germany’s power transmission system regulator. The agency said it is possible that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which links the country with Russia, will not be authorized to operate until June 2022.
Natural gas prices soared on the news. Russia supplies 40% of the product consumed in Europe, and the new pipeline, completed in September, makes it possible to significantly reduce its transit on branches that pass through Ukraine — leaving billions of dollars in tolls.
Both Berlin and Moscow say the issues at the table are technical, but the impact on chess underway in Eastern Europe is clear: the Germans may, for now, rein in an instrument of pressure from Putin. The problem is that they financed the project, and the situation shouldn’t go on indefinitely.
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