Russia and Ukraine have advanced in negotiations to find a ceasefire in the invasion promoted by Vladimir Putin in the neighboring country, which will complete three weeks at dawn this Thursday (17).
Not that peace is at hand: New Russian attacks on Kiev and other cities across the country, such as Kharkiv, indicate the Kremlin’s resolve to keep military pressure high while trying to wrest the closest terms to its demands from the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainian president, the cornered Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a message this Wednesday (16) that “the meetings continue and the positions during the negotiations already sound more realistic”. “But time is still needed for decisions that are in Ukraine’s interest,” he said. Virtual conversations follow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave an interview to the RBC website and said there is “hope for accommodation” about the neutrality that Moscow wants to see enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution, rejecting the possibility of joining NATO (Western military alliance).
The Kremlin, commenting on the case, went further and suggested that Ukraine should look to Austria and Sweden’s models of neutrality. “This is a variant that is being discussed and could be seen as a deal,” said spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
The Austrian case is more eloquent. Occupied by the Allies and the Soviet Union, rather than being divided like post-war Germany, the country inserted into its Constitution a waiver of participating in military pacts in 1955. More significantly for Ukraine, in 1995 Vienna entered the European Union , another wish of Kiev frowned upon by the Kremlin.
In that case, Peskov said, Ukraine would be demilitarized, as Putin promised, but would retain its armed forces. The attacks on Ukrainian defense material factories, intensified this week, may indicate that the Russians want to leave the demilitarization done in practice.
Sweden is a more complex example. Its neutrality came after the end of the Napoleonic wars, with the so-called Policy of 1812. It is not part of NATO, but it has a sophisticated defense industry created with an eye on Russia, and it is quite integrated into the alliance. Both she and also neutral Finland have been discussing formal accession to the pact.
“Neutral status is being seriously discussed now, along of course with security guarantees,” Lavrov said.
Such assurances were already laid down in Putin’s December ultimatum as he rallied troops around his neighbour. For the Russian, it is strategically unacceptable to have a NATO country the size of Ukraine on its borders. Two centuries of invasions there weigh on the decision-making process.
The Russian wants to restore the so-called strategic depth, to have allies or neutral countries around him, as in the times of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Since the end of the communist bloc, NATO has snapped up 14 countries to the east, taking advantage of Russian weakness.
In Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014 and now), Putin ignores international law to assert his point of view when other means do not work: in Belarus, Central Asia and the South Caucasus, he managed to maintain allies at the base of the support.
Leaving Kiev out of NATO was Russia’s central, public demand, but by no means the only one. Lavrov did not address the issue of recognizing Russian-speaking areas that are “de facto” outside Zelensky’s control, such as Crimea (annexed by Vladimir Putin in 2014) and Donbass (autonomous and in civil war since the same year).
On Tuesday (15), Zelensky had admitted that Ukraine has “closed doors” in NATO, in a virtual meeting with European leaders. He basically blamed them for not fulfilling their 2008 pledge to join the club, inferring that if he had been a member of the alliance he would not have been attacked by Moscow due to the mutual defense clause in place.
Lavrov also said there were advances in the possibility of restoring Russian as a second language in schools and lifting what he called a veto on freedom of expression in the Moscow language — in recent years, there has been a progressive suppression in favor of Ukrainian.
Russian chief negotiator Vladimir Mendiski told Interfax that the “negotiations are tough and slow”. “Of course we want it to happen faster. We want to reach peace as soon as possible. We want a free, independent and neutral Ukraine, not a member of military blocs, not a member of NATO,” he said.
Of course, in practice the Kremlin wants Zelensky’s surrender and increases the intensity of its attacks, although it has not made a decisive offensive – in the sense of trying to end the war with weapons, taking Kiev, for example.
The two sides play, after all, despite the horrendous destruction of Ukrainian lives and cities. There are more than 3 million refugees and civilian deaths are in the thousands, although no estimate seems exactly reliable at this point. Military casualties, then, are unfathomable: the Russians stopped counting at 500 in the first week, the Ukrainians exaggerate tens of thousands of dead invaders.
