After a Sunday of intense diplomatic movement, which ended with the White House admitting a summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin to discuss the crisis in Ukraine, the Kremlin lowered expectations on Monday (21).
“It is premature to talk about any specific plans to organize any kind of summit. There are no concrete plans,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The prospect of the meeting has generated some optimism amid growing tensions between Russia and the West. The Ukrainian issue, an unfinished civil war since 2014 between Kremlin-backed separatists and Kiev’s pro-Western government, has turned into a clash over the future of security in Europe.
Putin wants to end the eastward expansion of NATO, the Western military alliance, and by way of the European Union — since the process began in 1999, eight years after the end of the Cold War, 14 former Moscow satellites have joined the war club. .
To make his point, he used force and mobilized between 150,000 and 190,000 troops starting in November, including about 30,000 soldiers who are in exercises along Ukraine’s northern border, in the Belarusian-allied dictatorship.
On Sunday (20), the situation became dramatic: Russians and Belarusians decided to keep the troops where they are, and not withdraw them after ten days of maneuvers as had been announced. The day before, Putin invited dictator Aleksandr Lukachenko to accompany a major exercise by Russian nuclear forces.
French President Emmanuel Macron intervened in a 1h45min telephone conversation with Putin. He then spoke with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and with Biden. From that dance came the summit’s admission, “in principle”, according to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
The prerequisite for the conversation, she said, would be kind of obvious: no military action against Ukraine. Theoretically, the heads of diplomacy of both countries, Antony Blinken and Sergei Lavrov, meet on Thursday (24) in Geneva or Helsinki, and there the talks can move forward.
The Kremlin won’t make it easy. There is, among Putin’s more incendiary allies in the Russian media, a reading that the West is only trying to wind up the Kremlin and not seriously discuss Russia’s security demands. In this group, which is not necessarily heard by the president, invasion of Ukraine is the lightest thing you hear.
Putin continues to insist that he does not want war while giving signals in the opposite direction, either to raise the tension and his position to force a negotiation on his terms, or to go to pieces.
The US and UK, far from reliance on energy projects with Russians like Germany and France, consider the decision to invade already taken. This Monday, American intelligence services leaked new satellite images to TV networks that would prove the imminence of the action.
This has been going on since January. The invasion already had two dates (February 16 and 20), and now it will be “in the next few days”. The forecasts ignore the fact that military action, if any, looks much more likely on a limited basis in Donbass (eastern Ukraine) than across the country.
Another data passed to Western networks is that Russia would have mobilized 75% of its forces for the attack. It’s a no-brainer, unless you’re talking about tactical battalions, which is quite different from the 900,000-head Armed Forces at Putin’s disposal. As of Friday (18), there was talk of 40% of the 150,000 troops around Ukraine ready for action.
In this sense, Putin leads the way in narrative terms. Not without giving receipts that it intends to use all disinformation on its side: this Monday, the FSB (Federal Security Service, the main successor agency of the Soviet KGB) posted on its Telegram channel an image of a hut destroyed, allegedly by a Ukrainian shell. .
It would be a police post near Cherbakovo, a town close to the border with the so-called People’s Republic of Donetsk, one of the territories controlled by ethnic Russian separatists since the 2014 crisis – when Putin annexed Crimea and fomented war to avoid formal accession. from Kiev, which had just seen the Kremlin-aligned government fall, to the West.
It is impossible to know the reality. In Rostov-on-Don, the largest city close to the border and headquarters of the Russian Southern Military District, the atmosphere of apparent indifference among residents towards the crisis is punctuated by widespread disbelief.
In an unscientific sample of five people, the sheet heard the same thing: no one knows exactly what is happening at the border about 100 km away. There is an influx of refugees evacuated from Donbass, 60,000 so far, but for now they are being held in gyms and stadiums along the border.
“We know everything on TV, and it’s a little more of the same: Ukraine would be attacking the Russians in the Donbass, there will be a genocide, blah-blah-blah. I doubt it,” says taxi driver Ivan Alexeiévitch, who asked not to have the last name published.
