For over a decade, experts have noted that Russian political culture has been drifting away from the pragmatic, technocratic authoritarianism that characterized the first stage of the Vladimir Putin era, which was open to all sorts of cooperation with the West.
Now, it is taking a more ideological stance that sees the West as not merely a geopolitical foe but also the source of destructive moral and cultural contagion.
Russia is considering a law that will require any foreigners entering the country to sign a “loyalty agreement,” pledging not to defame Russia’s history or state institutions, nor to advocate for any “nontraditional” sexual ideas while visiting the country. Under the proposed legislation, which is being prepared by the Kremlin, there will be legal consequences for violators.
Another bill presently before the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, would target foreigners and Russians living abroad for statements and actions deemed “Russophobic” – expressing hatred or contempt toward Russia or things Russian. Punishments could include confiscation of property within Russia or a ban on entering the country.
In Soviet times, there was a coherent state ideology strictly curated by the Communist Party. But Russia’s emerging order seems a mix of tough but often vaguely worded laws designed to limit critical speech and public protest, strengthen military preparedness, and ban “deleterious” Western influences such as gender-affirming care and public homosexuality. At the same time, the government is pushing an ill-defined campaign to celebrate Russia’s distinctly conservative civilizational qualities, historical greatness, and adherence to “traditional” moral values.
“This is a way of consolidating the ‘good Russians,’ the patriotic ones, around [President] Putin and the Kremlin,” says Maria Lipman, co-editor of the Russia Post, a journal of Russian affairs published by George Washington University. “The government is the main trendsetter, but there are many public actors who put forward their own initiatives, sometimes a bit too much. But in the present atmosphere, it’s unacceptable to come up with any progressive proposal, but perfectly OK to float any socially conservative idea.”
An anti-progressive atmosphere
The Duma has erected a legislative fortress aimed at blocking the penetration of Western influence, beginning in 2012 with laws against foreign-connected civil society groups. Those laws have since led to the banning of most big, internationally connected organizations and the extension of the “foreign agent” label to hundreds of groups and individuals that are critical of authority.
The pace of anti-Western measures has intensified amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has convinced most Russians is a struggle for survival against a West united in its hostility.
While the Kremlin’s legal campaign is sweeping, lower-level officials are often eager to push further with their own socially conservative proposals, says Ms. Lipman. Some regional officials have suggested measures to prohibit young women from wearing pants, while a leading Duma deputy recently suggested the restoration of traditional shop classes in which girls learn to make borscht and boys learn to use tools.
“Some of these ideas are too much, and not likely to get official support,” she says. “But they have the effect of changing the atmosphere, and driving public moods further in the same direction.”
For example, growing calls to ban abortion, despite having support of the Russian Orthodox Church, will probably not go far in a society in which women tend to be better educated than men and have been part of the workforce, with full rights to control their private choices, for about a century.
But the mounting campaign against the “propaganda of nontraditional sexual identity” is another matter. Experts say that LGBTQ+ people enjoy very little public support in Russia, and hence the intensifying measures against them have received no pushback over the past decade. Any open expression of gay identity has been criminalized, gender transition has been legally prohibited, and depictions of any “nontraditional” behaviors have been banned from social media as well as from movies and TV.
Late last year, Russia’s Supreme Court branded the “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization,” a move that suggests authorities believe gay identity isn’t a native trait but must be a destructive import from abroad.
“This would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” says Boris Vishnevsky, a liberal deputy of the St. Petersburg city council. “They banned an organization that doesn’t exist, so no representatives were able to come forward and speak on its behalf. The effect of this absurd decision will just be to further silence the voices of anyone who has what they call a nontraditional orientation. Now they will be associated with that nonexisting extremist organization, and face criminal prosecution.”
Winning converts
Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which tracks extremist trends, in Moscow, says that much of the official worry over “woke” ideas is, ironically, inspired by Western right-wingers whom the Kremlin sees as a simpatico force.
“There are a lot of connections between Russian conservatives and especially those in the U.S.,” he says. “It seems they adopt some of their issues, such as opposing abortion and [gender-affirming care], even though these do not have very much relevance for Russian society. But it becomes part of the toolbox for propaganda and indoctrination.”
Opinion polls show that the Kremlin has been steadily winning its argument that the West is an implacable enemy whose malign influence needs to be resisted by means of strong laws, tougher social control, and vigorous propaganda.
“There is no longer a disbelief among the public when the government says the West is an enemy, as there used to be in the past,” says Ms. Lipman. “Most pro-Western liberals have left Russia since the war began and are no longer part of the internal discussion. Meanwhile Western leaders are sanctioning Russia, helping Ukraine, and openly saying their goal is to weaken Russia. Not surprisingly, Putin’s anti-Western stance has never been so convincing to the broad Russian public as it is today.”
Russia finally captured the Ukrainian fortress town of Avdeevka following a protracted battle that ended in Kiev’s chaotic retreat and the abandonment of its wounded troops. The timing took place as the Western elite met in Germany for this year’s Munich Security Conference over the weekend, which conveniently enabled them to plan their next moves in this proxywar. No significant financial or military aid is expected, however, despite Ukraine’s newly clinched security pacts with Germany and France.
Rather, as was explained here earlier in the month when analyzing the latest Biden-Scholz Summit in DC, the West’s focus will be on the long-term containment of Russia in Europe beyond the borders of that former Soviet Republic. To that end, Germany’s role as the US’ preferred “Lead From Behind” partner in the EU will become more prominent, which will take the form of connecting the “military Schengen” with the revived Weimar Triangle in order to accelerate the construction of “Fortress Europe”.
The preceding three hyperlinked analyses explain these concepts more in depth as well as their relationship, but they can be summarized as Germany exploiting its comprehensive subordination of Poland to resume its long-lost superpower trajectory after a nearly eight-decade-long hiatus. The reason why the West’s attention will turn towards accelerating this geostrategic shift instead of clinging to its proxy war on Russia via Ukraine after Avdeevka is because it’s now clear that the latter is a lost cause.
Russia already won the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO that Secretary General Stoltenberg declared almost exactly one year ago as proven by the counteroffensive’s failure and the subsequent reversal of this conflict’s dynamics whereby Ukraine is now once again on the defensive. Former Command-in-Chief Zaluzhny’s replacement Syrsky explicitly admitted this last week before the disastrous retreat from Avdeevka, which is regarded as Kiev’s last major fortress in Donbass.
The stage is now set for a forthcoming Russian offensive that could steamroll through the rest of this region in the best-case scenario from Moscow’s perspective and the worst-case one from the West’s. That’s not to say that this will indeed happen because the so-called “fog of war” makes it impossible to accurately discern Ukraine’s full defensive capabilities behind the Line of Contact (LOC), but it’s not without reason that the West is panicking and Zelensky decided to blame them for his latest defeat.
He complained that a so-called “artificial lack of weaponry” was responsible in an allusion to the congressional deadlock over more Ukraine aid, which Biden agreed with to pressure his political foes. Navalny’s unexpected death on Friday was taken advantage of by anti-Russian hawks to demand that the House pass the Senate’s proxy war funding bill when it resumes its session later this month, but even if it’s approved, the problem is that the US has already expended its stockpiles.
While it’s possible that it could dip into those reserves that it’s saved for meeting its national security needs and coerce its vassals into doing so as well, the fact of the matter is that the counteroffensive’s failure in spite of much larger aid given to Kiev up until then suggests that this won’t make a difference. Whatever might be sent would be used solely to hold the LOC as long as possible and prevent a Russian breakthrough in order to perpetuate the stalemate that Zaluzhny was the first to admit had set in by fall.
Truth be told, that description was inaccurate since the LOC continues gradually moving westward and the pace might speed up after Russia’s capture of Avdeevka. President Putin already signaled that he won’t stop until his security guarantee requests are met through military or diplomatic means after recently regretting that he hadn’t ordered the special operation to begin sooner and saying on Sunday after the fall of that Ukrainian fortress town that victory is “a matter of life and death” for Russia.
It remains unclear when and on what terms the conflict will end, but the writing is on the wall and it clearly reads that Russia’s security guarantee requests will be met to some extent or another, ergo why the West is now planning for a decades-long “confrontation” with Russia per Stoltenberg’s own words. Therein lies the significance of the geostrategic shift that was identified earlier in this analysis regarding Germany’s role as the US’ top “Lead From Behind” partner for containing Russia in Europe.
In furtherance of that goal, NATO’s continental-wide “Steadfast Defender 2024” drills – the largest since the end of the Old Cold War – will be aimed at optimizing the partial implementation of the “military Schengen” between Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands, which France is expected to soon join. The Baltics will likely also participate as well given that they require support for building their so-called “Baltic Defense Line”, which could extend up to the Arctic if Finland gets involved too as expected.
The revived Weimar Triangle comes into play since Germany requires French backing because Berlin can’t realistically do all of this on its own, which in turn necessitated Poland’s military subordination to its western neighbor via the abovementioned logistics pact between them. A military corridor from France to Estonia, which could reach Finland via Denmark-Sweden (the second of whom is a NATO aspirant and expected to join this new “Schengen”), is therefore taking shape before the world’s eyes.
Russia’s capture of Avdeevka will therefore reverberate across Europe by accelerating the implementation of these long-term containment plans seeing as how NATO’s proxy war on it through Ukraine is obviously a lost cause after the fall of that former Soviet Republic’s latest fortress town. It’s this geostrategic dynamic that observers should pay more attention to than anything else since the resumption of Germany’s long-lost superpower trajectory is a development of global significance.
Russia’s upper house of parliament on Wednesday (February 7th) unanimously approved a law that allows for confiscation of property and deprivation of military ranks and honorary titles for activities directed against the state, as well as for discrediting the country’s armed forces. Since the start of its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian government has granted itself a range of new powers to combat information deemed nonfactual and damaging to national security.
Under the new legislation, money, valuables and property acquired as a result of discrediting the military, as well as property used to carry out such activities, is subject to confiscation by court order.
A lawyer who spoke with Fontanka.ru explained how the law works by providing an example of “a person who committed a crime by publishing a message on the Internet from a mobile phone.” In this case, “the smartphone can be confiscated as an instrument of the crime, and if the convicted person received money for this crime, then that can also be confiscated.”
The legislation also permits the stripping of military ranks, as well as honorary and state titles, from those convicted of discrediting the army or advocating for activities that threaten the state.
Speaking at a plenary meeting in January, State Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said the bill was designed to punish “scoundrels and traitors who spit on the backs of our soldiers, betrayed our Motherland, and transfer money to the armed forces of the country that is at war with us.”
But what constitutes collusion with Russia’s enemies is open to interpretation.
Russia was the main exporter of uranium to the United States in November, and Russian gas continues to flow across Ukraine. On February 3, Gazprom disclosed that 42.4 million cubic meters of gas was being delivered daily to Europe via Ukraine’s Yelets–Kremenchuk–Kryvyi Rih pipeline. The gas transit deal with Kiev is expected to last until the end of 2024.
The new law expands on preexisting legislation that Russian authorities have used to crack down on speech deemed dangerous to national security. Just hours after President Vladimir Putin announced the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor, the federal government’s media watchdog and regulator, warned media outlets that they were required to use information only from official sources when preparing materials about the military intervention.
Less than two weeks later, on March 4, 2022, the Russian government criminalized “the public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in order to protect the interests of Russia and its citizens”, with a maximum punishment of 1.5 million rubles and fifteen years in prison.
Courts have not shied away from punishing the enemies of Russia.
In March, a 63-year-old man was sentenced to seven years behind bars for “posting two comments under other people’s posts on the VKontakte social network, which contained an aggressive attitude towards the authorities of the Russian Federation and hostility towards the course of the SMO in Ukraine.”
In December, a 28-year-old woman from St. Petersburg was sentenced to six months of “compulsory treatment” at a psychiatric hospital after she was convicted of posting fakes about the military on social media.
At the end of January, a 72-year-old pensioner received five years in prison for posting “information about the number of dead Russian military personnel” and an “emotional video.” The elderly woman admitted guilt but said she had acted emotionally after her brother, who lived in Ukraine, was buried under the rubble of a building that collapsed as a result of shelling. A Rostov region court ruled that she had been motivated by political hatred.
Fines are given for less serious offenses. In March 2022, a St. Petersburg court fined a resident 35,000 rubles for holding a sign in public that read “No to war”. The defendant was found guilty of “expressing his opinion and forming the opinion of those around him about the participation of the Russian Armed Forces (AF) in a war, and not in a special operation.”
In November 2023, a resident of Kamchatka was fined 30,000 rubles after a “linguistic study” determined that she had “denigrated” the Russian military in a social media post. Russian media has reported dozens of similar cases over the past two years.
Punishment is not reserved for those deemed “anti-war”. In September, A former member of a volunteer detachment in Donbass was fined 20,000 rubles for hanging a banner with the inscription: “Freedom for Strelkov”, and scattering leaflets demanding the release of the ex-Donetsk commander from a pre-trial detention center in Moscow. The defendant was found guilty of discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
In December, retired GRU colonel Vladimir Kvachkov was fined 50,000 rubles for discrediting the Russian army. Like Strelkov, Kvachkov supports military intervention in Ukraine but has been highly critical of the SMO’s execution.
A month later, Strelkov himself was sentenced to four years in prison, purportedly in connection to several Telegram posts he wrote. The evidence against Strelkov was deemed a “state secret” and his trial was closed to the public.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained in a November interview that “certain censorship” is required during “wartime”. He acknowledged, however, that the rules against dangerous speech are somewhat ambiguous.
“Where is the line? I can’t answer this question. [The line] is very thin. And therefore, I would advise all those who speculate indiscriminately and throw words of criticism towards our army without understanding the essence of the matter … to think ten times,” Peskov advised.
The line is constantly moving. On February 15, 2022—a week before Russia launched its special military operation—Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned reports about Moscow’s impending military intervention as “information terrorism”.
I watched with interest evaluations of the Putin interview last night aired on Russian state television’s Vesti program, read assorted articles on this subject published in yesterday’s Johnson’s Russia List and the comments which readers posted on my website or sent to me directly via email.
I think the issues are worthy of further discussion and that is the objective of today’s essay.
It should come as no surprise that yesterday’s Vesti only sang the praises of the interview and of Putin’s performance in particular. In that context they put on air the very complimentary remarks of two Americans from the intelligence community who in recent months have become the darlings of Russian television: Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson. I will only say that both showed poor judgment in giving unqualified thumbs-up. Why? I hope that will become clear from what I have to say today to amplify and dig down deeper into the critique that I sketched yesterday.
By its nature, a website like mine attracts a goodly number of Russia-cheerleaders who don’t want to hear any sour notes. Many of these folks know little or nothing about Russia and rely on guesswork that ignores highly relevant facts available to Russia speakers.
The question of who was the target audience for the Tucker Carlson-Putin interview is critical. Was it the United States? the Collective West? the Russian domestic public? China, India and the Global South?
As I said yesterday, the Kremlin elites hoped that the interview would get around U.S. censorship and bring the Russian perspective directly to the ears and eyes of the broad American public, which also, of course, includes American elites. It is highly likely that Tucker Carlson was on the same wave length, since Americans are the folks he hopes to entice to become paying subscribers to his Network and also because he likely believes he can influence the course of history by waking up his compatriots. Each time Carlson brings in 40 million viewers he puts to shame the likes of CNN whose viewer numbers are ten times less, if I may be generous to them.
With this objective in mind, I continue to believe that Putin’s decision to deliver a 30 minute opening history lecture by way of answer to Carlson’s question of why Russia invaded was a bad decision. It was bad for several reasons. One is that it was boring for the general public. Yes, the interview attracted 140 million ‘hits’ on Carlson’s website, but we are not told how long those viewers stayed tuned. Secondly, Putin is not a professional historian and anything he said would be pulled to pieces by academics in the States, not just by the usual journalistic commentators. Thirdly, the history going back to the 9th century had nothing to do with the decision to invade Ukraine, which was prompted and justified internally in the Kremlin by reasons of Realpolitik, not by what is called Romantic Nationalism.
As I have said in the past, Realpolitik does not go down well with the general public in Russia as in many other countries whereas Romantic Nationalism does. Mothers don’t willingly send their sons to die for Realpolitik. Hence, the story of how Russians and Ukrainians are just brothers and similar platitudes in many of Putin’s speeches to his domestic audience. But if you have any marketing sense, and I tell you frankly that the people advising Putin seem at times to have zero marketing sense, then you prepare your speech around who is the intended audience, in this case the USA.
Putin’s explanation of why he chose to invade should have started with the year 2008, when the U.S. insisted that NATO offer membership to Ukraine. After all, the trigger for the war in February 2022 was the refusal of the United States to negotiate on Russia’s demand that Ukraine remain neutral and that NATO pull back to its 1996 borders. Note that after one hour of the interview Purin himself says this, but I believe it is too late and many who came to Tucker’s platform will not have stayed with it long enough to hear this.
In the same vein, Putin never answered Tucker Carlson’s reasonable question as to why, knowing as he did that modern Ukraine is an ‘artificial state’ concocted by Lenin and his associates in 1922 to satisfy their own needs to consolidate power throughout what had been the Russian Empire, knowing as he did that the Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted before 2014 and were being bombed and shelled after 2014, why did he wait so long to move against the regime in Kiev. Fair question, I might add, as I poke back at some readers who insisted that Carlson is just an ignorant clown.
The answer is available and well known among Russia’s foreign policy professionals: Putin could not dare act until Russia’s armed forces were sufficiently modernized and strengthened, until the Russian economy was made similarly robust to survive any threats coming from the West should Russia forcefully push for regime change in Kiev. That moment arrived in 2018 when Putin announced to the world the serial production of strategic arms including hypersonic missiles that put Russia years ahead of the USA and presented a window of opportunity to act. Meanwhile conventional weapons of superior quality were being delivered to the armed forces and the economy was being readied for the most severe sanctions, beginning with the ‘import substitution’ programs launched in 2014. I do not see why setting out these real motivations on air to the American public was not done.
A couple of readers noted that Tucker introduced his Sinophobe thinking into the interview with Putin, asking pointedly whether Russians are happy to be rushing into the arms of China, whether they understand that Xi is using BRICS to dominate its partners just as Washington has been doing with its allies. Putin responded in line with what he has been saying at many forums, namely that Russia and China have an exceptionally strong cooperation in many spheres that is mutually beneficial. However, he added something that I have rarely heard him say: “Russia and China have thousands of kilometers of common borders. You don’t choose your neighbors, just as you don’t choose your relatives.” Here is precisely the Realpolitik mentality that I have alluded to above. The game is not about kissy-kissy. It is about the necessities of life and playing with the hand you are dealt.
If I may expand on the China issue, I believe Russia had no particular interest in how many Chinese or Indians tuned in to watch the interview. The Chinese as a people may or may not have particularly warm feelings for Russians. I can assure you that the man in the street Russian has mixed feelings about China, of which the most evident are fear and envy. The Chinese loggers who rape the forests of Eastern Siberia are denounced in Russian media, as are the many Chinese farmer settlers in the Far East who find Russian wives and move in permanently, changing the fragile demography. But none of this can or should influence policy in Moscow, which is focused on the big picture of Russian interests.
China is without question one of the most supportive countries in the world in Russia’s hour of need. And Xi’s actions are similarly based on realism. As the hero of The Queen of Spades Hermann sings in his last aria, Сегодня ты, завтра я! – Today it is you, tomorrow it will be me!
The Istanbul Accords have reached a mythic status in segments of the non-interventionist commentariat with whom I usually agree. Numerous thinkers whom I greatly esteem—Alexander Mercouris, Alastair Crooke, Branko Marcetic, Ivan Katchanovski, Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, David Sachs, and Doug Bandow—have held that Ukraine and Russia were on the brink of an agreement in Istanbul in spring 2022, only to have the settlement vetoed by the United States. I disagree. I think the Istanbul Accords were a phantom.
The critics enlist as evidence for their view people who were close to the negotiators—mediators like Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor and confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin; Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who played an essential early role in starting negotiations (and obtained Putin’s pledge that he wouldn’t kill Ukrainian resident Volodymyr Zelensky); and Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. Each mediator has presented a similar narrative: there was an agreement in hand that was rejected under U.S. pressure. “The Ukrainians did not agree on peace,” Schröder argued, “because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans.”
As Mercouris has argued, “What we almost got on the 29th of March and thereafter was an armistice agreement, a cessation of hostilities, followed by a substantive negotiation between the Russians and the Ukrainians sorting out the accumulated problems that had emerged between them and which had led to the war. And what we got instead was the abortion of that entire process, the cancellation of the all-but-agreed armistice and cessation of hostilities.” The abortion was performed by the United States, whose emphatic rejection of negotiations was delivered by then-British prime minister Boris Johnson on April 9, 2022. “The result was months, and years, of war, which have brought Ukraine to the brink of military defeat,” said Mercouris.
This account misses the central elements of what actually happened in the peace negotiations. Much evidence shows Russia and Ukraine were never on the brink of an agreement at any point in their negotiations. Although the course of the talks revealed surprising points of consensus, large and intractable differences remained. Consequently, there was no prospect of an immediate ceasefire. This impasse had emerged well before Johnson’s April 9 trip.
These contentions, in my view, do not absolve the United States of responsibility for inciting and prolonging the war in other respects—that is a separate question—but they do attest to the intractability of the differences existing, then as now, between the parties. Most critically, the aforementioned critics present a false picture of Ukrainians longing for peace, pulled back from that happy outcome only by Anglo-American pressure. The truth is that the Ukrainians didn’t want peace on terms anywhere close to what was on offer by the Russians. A few seers apart, they wanted to fight. A review of the negotiations will make these points clear.
Breakthrough at Istanbul?
Peace negotiations commenced in Belarus a week after Russia’s invasion on February 24. Russia wanted Ukrainian recognition of the independence of the Donbas republics and Crimea’s incorporation within the Russian Federation, together with the demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine. Ukraine demanded “legally verified security guarantees; ceasefire; withdrawal of Russian troops.”
The first inkling of a breakthrough came in mid-March 2022 when the FT reported progress on “a tentative peace plan including a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal if Kyiv declares neutrality and accepts limits on its armed forces.” Ukraine would promise “not to host foreign military bases or weaponry in exchange for protection from allies such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Turkey.” As negotiations proceeded, the Russians reportedly dropped “denazification” as a war aim. They also accepted that Ukraine could join the EU but not NATO.
Then came the Istanbul Communique of March 29, 2022, drafted by Ukraine. It built on the tentative peace plan previously disclosed. Ukraine presented this at the first and only meeting of the parties in Istanbul. Subsequent negotiations were conducted by video conference. Oleksiy Arestovych, then a close aide to Zelensky, said that Zelensky shut down negotiations on April 3 or thereabouts after learning of alleged Russian atrocities at Bucha—the theme also of Yaroslav Trofimov’s reporting in the Wall Street Journal—but negotiations of some sort continued, perhaps with a reshuffled Ukrainian negotiating team. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on April 7 spoke of a Ukrainian draft treaty being delivered on April 6, though he didn’t like what he saw.
Russia responded warmly to certain propositions in the Istanbul Communique. “For the first time ever,” said Lavrov, “the Ukrainian side has put on paper that it is prepared to declare Ukraine a neutral, non-aligned and non-nuclear state, and to refuse to deploy weapons from foreign states on its territory or to conduct exercises on its territory with the participation of foreign military personnel, unless they are approved by all guarantors of the future treaty, including the Russian Federation.”
On March 29, the Ukrainian delegation thought they had achieved “completely successful negotiations.” Arestovych recalls that they celebrated with champagne on their return from Istanbul. But they misread the Russian response as total acceptance of their propositions. Vladimir Medinsky, who led the Russian delegation, greeted the Istanbul Communique as “a constructive step” from the Ukrainian side “towards reaching a compromise” and promised “an appropriate response” after due consideration. Alexander Mercouris noted in his March 31, 2022, broadcast that Russian officials had “made it perfectly clear that these are only tentative moves by the Ukrainians. They do not in any way approximate to the kind of offer that the Russians could accept, and they all predict long, tough negotiations continuing and going forward.”
On April 4, 2022, Mercouris emphasized the rancor of the negotiations after March 29: “The Ukrainians yesterday were making all kinds of claims that the Russians have retracted most of their demands and accepted Ukrainian proposals almost in their totality. The Russians very quickly came out and said that this was simply untrue and that Russian demands remained as they were.” The negotiations after Istanbul were marked by heated accusations of bad faith. Both sides, it seems, thought they had agreed on something, but they did not agree on what that was. Rather than being on the brink of an agreement, they quickly discovered that their positions remained far apart.
These points of disagreement can be traced in Lavrov’s commentaries on the negotiations. On April 7, Lavrov held that “a glint of realism” had informed Ukraine’s March 29 Istanbul Communique but insisted that the Ukrainian draft agreement of the previous day (April 6) departed in signal respects from it. It lacked clarity regarding the status of Crimea and Sevastopol. It demanded that there be a cessation of hostilities before a meeting of Putin and Zelensky, which was unacceptable to Russia. Ukraine also insisted that the provisions regarding military exercises by external powers on Ukrainian territory could be executed with the consent of the majority of the guarantor states, eliminating the veto that Russia thought it had gotten on March 29.
The gap between the parties on the meaning of neutrality is especially pronounced if we examine Zelensky’s explication of Ukraine’s proposals on March 28. These envisaged security guarantees from the permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) and a coalition of other states: Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, Israel, and any other nation that wished to join. In Zelensky’s view, the purpose was to substitute for the security guarantee that NATO was then unwilling (and remains still unwilling) to give. The security guarantees would mandate a no-fly-zone within seventy-two hours of a Russian infraction of the treaty, far in advance of anything that NATO had offered. In his view, the movement of these forces in aid of Ukraine would not be subject to a Russian veto.
The security architecture Zelensky envisioned meant guarantees that were more emphatic than those offered in NATO’s Article 5. His conception was much more like the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgian neutrality (whose violation by Germany in 1914 helped provoke British intervention in the European War) than the kind of neutrality Finland had enjoyed during the Cold War, which is what the Russians wanted for Ukraine. Zelensky insisted that getting these external guarantees—a potentially lengthy process—was a condition for Ukraine’s ratification of the treaty, as was a national referendum. In the meantime, he wanted a ceasefire paired with a Russian withdrawal to the February 23 lines.
The Istanbul discussions over neutrality, often seen as a conceptual breakthrough, were something of a conceptual muddle, as the parties entertained sharply conflicting notions of what that would or could practically entail. Russia thought it got a veto on international military exercises in Ukraine, as stated in Proposal 3 of the Istanbul Communique; Ukraine later backpedaled on that point. The initial offer probably didn’t reflect Ukraine’s bottom line, as the negotiators never intended that their security would be subject to a Russian veto.
These were not the only disagreements to emerge after March 29. The Ukrainians had proposed that the issues of Crimea and Sevastopol be left to bilateral negotiations for fifteen years. Arestovych still seems to be under the impression that the Russians had agreed to that proposal, which he thought was highly advantageous to Ukraine. But the Russians rejected that approach publicly in the first days of April. “Among our non-negotiable demands,” Medinsky later recalled, “were the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea [and] the recognition of the independence of the Donbass republics.” There was no prospect that Ukraine could have kept its eastern territories by agreeing to neutrality.
At that time, as later, this “land for peace” deal was stoutly opposed by some 80 percent of Ukrainians, so Zelensky’s ability to accept it was constricted even if he wanted to agree. Russia’s insistence on this point contradicts Gerhard Schröder’s idea that the Russians were prepared to give the Donbas a status like South Tyrol in their peace plan. The last thing that Putin could accept was the revival of Minsk II. Even Medinsky’s cautious acceptance of the framework Ukraine offered on March 29 was greeted with derision in domestic Russian opinion: “Medinsky did more damage in three minutes than all the Ukrainian propaganda in a month,” said one critic.
On April 5, Lavrov expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the state of the negotiations. “If the Ukrainian delegation is going to continue to talk about the need for additional steps on the part of the Russian Federation, vehemently refuse (as it is doing now) even to discuss the goals of denazification and demilitarization and restoring Russian language rights, and insist that there are no problems with the Russian language or the rights of the Russian-speaking people and Nazification reaching all areas of that country’s life, I do not think this will be helpful in advancing the negotiating process.”
Russia never signed on to the Istanbul Communique in its entirety. Russia’s own statements at the time contradict Putin’s recent assertion that “in Istanbul we agreed on everything.” Russia accepted the Ukrainian demarche as a positive first step that required further discussion and clarification. On April 7, Lavrov promised that the Russian answer, when it came, would spell out “all the key positions and demands very clearly and in full.”
The Russian draft treaty was presented to Ukraine on April 15, 2022. This was the document that Putin waved in the air in his speech to African leaders in June 2023. Medinsky told the New York Times in May 2022 that Russia had submitted its own treaty draft at that time, so the existence of this document was known. Still, Putin’s intervention gave it a name—“The Treaty on the Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine.” Putin also inadvertently disclosed important details previously unknown.
When the draft treaty was submitted to the Ukrainians, ironically, the peace process had already broken down. On April 12, Putin himself declared the talks at a dead end. Russia never received an answer to its April 15 propositions. That the head of the Ukrainian delegation initialed the Russian draft, a fact on which Putin now lays great emphasis, meant only an acknowledgment that Ukraine had received it.
The most important revelation in Putin’s June 2023 speech came in the military annex, a separate one-page memorandum that recorded stark differences in the military forces to be allowed in Ukraine under the agreement (250,000 in the Ukrainian version, 100,000—of which 15,000 were reservists— in the Russian.) This showed that the parties were far apart on one of Russia’s key criteria for peace: demilitarization. At the time, too, Ukraine was mobilizing vast numbers of volunteers and reservists, with over 500,000 forces either in or soon-to-be-in arms. In his March 28 interview outlining Ukraine’s negotiating posture, Zelensky rejected demilitarization as unthinkable. Russia, in its draft treaty, continued to insist upon it.
Neither party has published nor leaked the April 15 draft treaty, which Putin claimed contained eighteen sections. Both sides may have been embarrassed by its contents. Putin said Russia “never agreed with the Ukrainian side that this treaty would be confidential,” but he didn’t release it. Lavrov, however, had promised on April 7 a complete statement of the Russian position; the draft treaty doubtless fulfilled that promise while also incorporating those elements of the Istanbul Communique—Ukrainian neutrality, non-alignment, renunciation of nuclear weapons—that were to Russia’s liking.
We must assume that the Russian draft treaty included an acknowledgment of Crimea’s membership in the Russian Federation and of the independence of the Donbas republics, with the territorial boundaries the DPR and LPR claimed in their 2014 referenda (only half of which they controlled before the war). We must also assume that the treaty included language mandating both demilitarization and denazification, which Zelensky had previously called deal-breakers and which were not part of the Istanbul Communique. How these propositions were framed is unknown, but the predominant sentiment among the Ukrainians likely saw them as intolerable infringements on their sovereignty. That’s one of the reasons they walked away from the Russian offer. They had others.
The Elusive Ceasefire
The Russians and the Ukrainians were also sharply divided over when a ceasefire would take place. For the Ukrainians, it was to happen immediately. It would entail the retreat of Russian forces to the February 23 lines, after which the two presidents would meet and agree to a treaty. For the Russians, a ceasefire would happen once the treaty had been executed to Russia’s satisfaction. This Russian posture set onerous but inherently ambiguous conditions for halting the fighting. The conditions, of course, never came close to being fulfilled. During the negotiating process, there was never a point when a ceasefire was “all but agreed.”
On April 5, Lavrov rejected any notion of an imminent ceasefire; Russia wouldn’t play “the cat-and-mouse game” in which a ceasefire was given in exchange for nonbinding commitments. As Mercouris reported the Russian position on April 6: “The Russians intend to keep their troops in Ukraine beyond the borders, the territories of Donbas, in places like Kherson, Zaporozhye, and wherever until Ukraine not only signs but ratifies this treaty—which is one which the Russians insist must make fundamental concessions on the state of Crimea and Donbas and on the issues of demilitarization and denazification— and put those provisions fully into effect.”
A ceasefire put off until the treaty went into effect meant that Ukraine had to demilitarize before Russia agreed to a truce or withdrawal of its forces. According to the military annex, Ukraine would have to reduce its troops to 100,000 instead of increasing them to 500,000 or 1,000,000 (as it was furiously trying to do). The likelihood of such demilitarization in April 2022 was just about nil. Neither party could trust the other to fulfill its obligations. The danger that the other party would use a pause in fighting to augment its forces weighed on both sides.
These factors point to the truism that it is much easier to stop a war from starting in the first place than to stop it once it has started. There is no evidence, in any case, that the parties had even begun discussions on the military deconfliction (across a 1200-kilometer front) that would need to occur in the event of a ceasefire.
Given these manifest obstacles, it is difficult to see the basis for the claim that an agreement and a ceasefire were imminent at any point in April 2022. Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian diplomat who served on Ukraine’s delegation at the peace talks, recently claimed that the parties were very close to an agreement in mid-to-late April. Still, the assumption on which he rests this judgment is very questionable.
A week into the war, says Ambassador Chaly, Putin had concluded he had made a big mistake and, hence, was ready to reverse course. Was that really Putin’s view? If it was, it was not reflected in Putin’s subsequent conduct or public statements at the time, which displayed a steely resolution that Russia’s war aims would be achieved. Just when Chaly said that Putin was feeling defeated, Russian military spokesmen were claiming to have Ukraine on the ropes and to have destroyed a tremendous amount of its military capacity.
The logic of Chaly’s position is that Putin thought he was losing the war and would have to make critical compromises. Arestovych believed a similar dynamic was at work, with Russia retreating in late March on its diplomatic positions regarding demilitarization and denazification just as it withdrew from outside Kyiv. It is likely, however, that the treaty Russia presented on April 15 was based on the opposite calculation: that Ukraine was losing and would have to appease Russia or face continued war. These opposing understandings nixed any possibility of a ceasefire.
Johnson’s Visit and the U.S. Role
Critics of the U.S. role have emphasized the importance of Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv as the decisive event that turned Ukraine against a peace agreement. Western spokesmen, by contrast, have vehemently denied that the United States played any role in sabotaging the accords. “Utter bullshit,” a senior administration official told Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal. “I know for a fact the United States didn’t pull the plug on that. We were watching it carefully.” Boris Johnson, interviewed by the Times of London, agreed. “This is nothing but total nonsense and Russian propaganda.” In his April visit to Kyiv, Johnson recalled expressing deep skepticism of any Russian offer. He pledged “1000 percent” support for aiding Ukraine’s military resistance but didn’t tell Zelensky what to do.
I am inclined to minimize the significance of Johnson’s visit, in part because stark differences over the peace deal had already emerged and in part because the message Johnson conveyed in Kyiv had already been repeatedly communicated before his arrival.
Immediately after the outbreak of war, Western governments declared a total economic and financial war against Russia. Western authorities froze $300 billion of Russian reserves and expected a withering blow against Russian financial and military power. Defense ministries were gearing up for large-scale arms transfers to Ukraine. In his speech in Warsaw on March 26, 2022, President Joe Biden called for Putin’s removal, saying that his invasion of Ukraine stemmed from a “craving for absolute power and control.” Biden called for “swift and punishing costs” that would be “unprecedented and overwhelming.” There was no hint of compromise in the Biden administration’s approach.
The hardline approach, suffused with anger, that arose after February 24 in the United States and Europe ruled out any negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine. How could Zelensky make peace with Putin if the West did not do so? A separate Russian-Ukrainian peace, absent a larger peace between Russia and the West, was inconceivable then because it would require Ukraine to entrust its fortunes to the Russians. It is also the case, however, that Zelensky encouraged a stiff Western response and wished the West to go much further. He was still angling for a no-fly-zone on April 10, having asked for that from the war’s outset. He wanted his partners to cosplay Winston Churchill, not Neville Chamberlain. Boris Johnson obliged him.
The Western attitudes precluded a Russo-Ukraine agreement, but the West didn’t put the squeeze on Zelensky to reject the Russian treaty. He had reasons of his own to disown it. He was hankering for Western support and would have gone ballistic had the Americans, reversing their decade-old policy, told him to suck it up and make a deal with the Russians.
The narrative under consideration—the Ukrainians wanted to accept Russia’s offer, but the Americans wouldn’t allow it—ignores the existence of a potent Ukrainian nationalism that refused concessions on points the Russians considered vital.
In his most recent statement, Davyd Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, denied that a peace agreement was possible with Russia in the war’s first months. Many observers misread his earlier remarks about the Istanbul peace talks. They heard him say that there was a simple deal on the table, conceding Ukrainian neutrality in exchange for an end to the war, whereas, in fact, Arakhamia was explaining why the deal didn’t happen. In his latest interview, Arakhamia also downplayed the significance of Johnson’s visit, which he had previously mentioned as a factor in Ukraine’s decision to reject the treaty: “Neither then nor now do any of our [Western] partners give Ukraine instructions on how to build its defenses or what political decisions to take. This is the sovereign right of the Ukrainian leadership.”
Those assertions seem credible. Critics suspect that U.S. power is being brought to bear behind the scenes to tell its dependents what’s what, but in our weird empire, it often works the other way around. Allies get 100 percent support and lots of green lights. Just tell us what you want, and we’ll support you as long as it takes.
Ivan Katchanovski believes that Johnson’s visit was decisive in sabotaging an accord. The abandonment of negotiations did not come after Bucha, he argues, but after Johnson’s visit. He cites Zelensky on April 9, the day of Johnson’s visit, when he said, “We don’t want to lose opportunities, if we have them, for a diplomatic solution.” However, the fact that Zelensky would not publicly declare the negotiations at an end does not show that he was ready to accept the Russian position. He was not. He said he favored a diplomatic solution but did not say he was willing to surrender Donbas or Crimea. He did not say he was ready to accept Ukraine’s demilitarization. He did not say that he had abandoned his quest for a substitute NATO via security guarantees from outside powers. He did not accept Russia’s interpretation of when a ceasefire would take effect.
A Tangled Web
There is much we don’t know about the course of the spring 2022 negotiations; historians and polemicists will undoubtedly argue about their crooked path for a long time to come. Naftali Bennett recalled that the parties exchanged seventeen drafts, of which there is little to no public record. Ukrainian negotiators said at the time that the Russians were shifting their positions almost daily. The Russians said the same about the Ukrainians. A tangled web, indeed.
However, the public record does disclose far-reaching differences between the parties that persisted throughout the negotiations. Though Russia’s terms preserved Ukrainian sovereignty in most of its territory, it did amount to an effective Ukrainian capitulation on the points that had brought about the war. The Ukrainians were in no mood to do that. That made any peace agreement a remote prospect in the spring of 2022.
