Vladimir Putin’s Russia listed for the first time the conditions it presented to Ukraine to end the war that has devastated the neighboring country for 12 days.
In a telephone interview with Reuters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the operation “is over in an instant” if Kiev surrenders militarily, changes its constitution to ensure it never joins NATO, the Western military, or the European Union, to recognize the Crimea annexed in 2014 as Russian and the so-called breakaway republics of Donbass, in the east, as independent.
According to Peskov, Russian negotiators already informed the Ukrainians of their terms last week, when they held two meetings in Belarus. The third round takes place this Monday (7), also in the Moscow allied dictatorship, which serves as a basis for actions in northern Ukraine.
Peskov says that there will be no additional territorial demands to be made, which does not match the map that is drawn on Ukrainian soil, particularly with the establishment of a land bridge between Donbass and Crimea, base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
If the city of Mariupol, under intense siege and object of discussion about humanitarian corridors, falls, such a link is established. And Putin’s forces are fighting their way to Odessa, Ukraine’s biggest port. If they succeed, despite the setbacks on the way over the weekend, they can isolate the country from the sea.
“We are really finishing the demilitarization of Ukraine. We are going to finish it. But the main thing is for Ukraine to stop its military action. Then nobody will shoot,” Peskov said. In other words, the Kremlin wants the Ukrainians to surrender, something that Volodymyr Zelensky’s government rejects. On Saturday (5), Putin had said that Ukraine was in danger of ceasing to be a sovereign state.
“They must make amendments to the constitution according to which Ukraine will refuse to enter any bloc,” he said of neutrality. The phrase is important, as “any bloc” indicates not only the Russians’ vaunted fear of having a huge NATO member country close to their borders, but also the desire to prevent the European Union from turning Ukraine into a showcase of the kind of democracy that might inspire Putin’s opponents in Russia.
Peskov said “it would be a matter of time” to see intermediate missiles and other offensive weapons deployed in a Ukraine that is part of NATO. “We had to act.” The issue of neutrality was at the heart of Putin’s ultimatum to the US and NATO in December, which was rejected outright by Westerners. In this case, the Russian wanted their assurance that they would not bring Ukraine to their side.
In 2008, such a possibility led the Kremlin to fight a war in Georgia, which it won in five days. The 2014 actions in Ukraine already followed this logic, as the pro-Russian government in Kiev had fallen after street protests for not having accepted a trade deal with the Europeans. Putin seeks to maintain the belt that separates Russia from its adversaries, as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union did before.
Finally, the existing territorial issues. That the retaking of Crimea by Moscow in 2014 is a fait accompli is admitted by any Western diplomat. Getting Kiev to accept seems more difficult. The same applies to the so-called “people’s republics” of Donbass, based in Donetsk and Lugansk, home to 4 million people, mostly Russian-speaking, and 800,000 of them with Russian passports.
“That doesn’t mean that we are taking Lugansk and Donetsk from Ukraine. They don’t want to be part of Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean they should be destroyed as a result,” the spokesman said, going over the initial justification for the action. Putin — the supposed protection of the two areas that have been autonomous since the civil war that followed the annexation of Crimea. “For the rest, Ukraine is an independent state that will live as it wants, under conditions of neutrality,” he said. Russia recognized the two regions three days before the start of the war. “We understand that they would be attacked.”
