On a Monday full of diplomatic moves around the Ukraine crisis, Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin said they had found common ground to negotiate, while Joe Biden escalated his threats if Russia invaded their neighbour.
At the same time, a central and hitherto absent part of Europe’s security crisis, ethnic Russian separatists from eastern Ukraine have made a dramatic entry into the news, warning of the risk of war and asking Russia to help bolster their positions.
All of this took place between Moscow, where the French met the Russian, Washington, where the American president received German Prime Minister Olaf Scholz, and Donetsk, where the pro-Russian rebels spoke.
The most showy effort was the one staged at the Grand Kremlin Palace, where Macron spent hours in the corner of a huge table talking to Putin — if image is everything, the Russian won the day there. In a press conference that took place after midnight local time, on Tuesday (8), both maintained a firmer tone.
Putin reaffirmed his demands that NATO (Western military alliance) forget about Ukraine and Macron, that the West does not accept such a demand. But he gave a passphrase: “Some of his ideas, which it’s probably too early to talk about, I think it’s quite possible that they form the basis of our next joint steps.”
Macron, desperate for some sort of diplomatic victory to show the electorate that he should go to the polls in April, said the same and said the two would talk more after he visited Kiev on Tuesday. No bombastic headlines, but keeping channels open at a time of high tension, with more than 100,000 Russian troops threatening to enforce Putin’s determination to keep buffer areas between himself and his rival.
France is already part of the quartet, with Ukraine, Russia and Germany, which has been trying to negotiate peace in Ukraine since 2014, when Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and supported separatists in Donbass (east of the country) after the fall of the pro-government. Moscow from Kiev.
A less positive tone was seen in the US, where Biden welcomed the new German chancellor, who is under intense pressure for his ambiguous stance on the crisis. Germany is one of Europe’s biggest customers of Russian natural gas, and has been holding off the opening of a new mega-pipeline for the product since the end of the year.
“If Russia invades Ukraine, there will be no Nord Stream 2,” Biden said, citing the central pipeline to Putin’s European plans. Scholz, questioned, only said that the US and Germany would act together on the issue.
Berlin has refused to supply lethal weapons to Ukrainians, and has even banned flights with such equipment from the UK and US over its territory. The most he did was announce the deployment of 350 more troops to the contingent he leads in Lithuania, one of NATO’s four multinational frontline bases with Russia.
Its foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, is in Kiev listening to the same sermon as her counterpart, Dmitro Kuleba, and President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Both leaders said they were “working together” to stop what they called Russian aggression. As the US and NATO rejected Putin’s ultimatum, the speech follows the line that Moscow will be punished with sanctions if it advances the military line.
Novelty even came from two interviews with the Reuters agency given by separatist leaders.
In one, the president of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, based in the city of the same name, said that “all-out war can happen at any time.” “We don’t rule out being forced to turn to Russia if Ukraine crosses certain boundaries,” said Denis Puchilin.
At the same time, he said that such a conflict would be “crazy”. Earlier, it had been the turn of Alexander Khodakovski, an influential and controversial Donetsk military commander, to say that he needs military reinforcement from the Kremlin.
“We have 30,000 soldiers, but only 10,000 are ready for combat. We need at least 40,000 armed for the battle front”, he said. He praised the call made by Andrei Turchak, one of the leaders of United Russia, Putin’s support party, for the Russians to send troops and reinforcements to Donbass.
So far, Putin has not played that card in the crisis, which began when Moscow deployed perhaps 130,000 men and equipment to fronts around Ukraine.
The Russian denies the intention to invade, but has issued an ultimatum with its terms for European peace, basically calling for an end to the expansion of NATO (Western military alliance), starting with the renunciation of a Ukrainian membership.
Since 2014, it is certain that Russian forces have operated in the region and entered with heavy equipment, although this is not explicitly stated publicly. So far, some 700,000 Russian passports have been issued to residents of the region, increasing ties with Moscow and bolstering Putin’s case for defending Russians outside their territory.
Finally, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, met with the European Union’s head of diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who left the meeting saying that Europe is living “the most dangerous moment since the Cold War, and that is not alarmism”.
And in Brussels, Norwegian NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg kept the ferment high by saying that temporary reinforcements in defenses in Eastern Europe, with the initial deployment of 3,000 US troops and other measures, could become permanent. “We are considering long-term adjustments to our stance,” he said.
