By Volodymyr Ishchenko, Facebook, 4/16/24
Ishchenko is a left-wing Ukrainian sociologist and a Research Fellow at Alameda Institute and works at Research Associate at Osteuropa-Institut Berlin and is a member at PONARS Eurasia.
Foreign Affairs published a very well researched article by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko on the Istanbul talks based on previously unpublished drafts of the peace agreement. It argues against a number of myths and misconceptions about why the talks failed and also why the war started.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine
In particular, they argue against the explanation that the talks failed because it was allegedly impossible to continue negotiations with Russia after the discovery of the war crimes in Bucha.
“Still, the behind-the-scenes work on the draft treaty continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.”
Unfortunately, the authors did not mention that the most systematic evidence we have shows that the public opinion in Ukraine was favorable to the negotiations with Russia to end the war even after Bucha. A poll commissioned by NDI in May 2022 showed that 59% of Ukrainians supported negotiations with Russia.
Since then, that number has plummeted, reflecting overheated expectations of Ukraine’s victory, fueled in particular by the West. P. 20 here:
Considering all the methodological issues and biases with war-time polling in Ukraine, 59% was an indication of a strong majority for negotiations. Just after the loss of Bakhmut, support for negotiations began to rise, despite more war crimes and bombing of energy infrastructure. What may be relevant here is the possible pressure of a better organized, mobilized, and armed minority camp against a fragmented, disorganized, and disarticulated majority. The same class and political asymmetry that contributed to the stagnation of Minsk agreements.
https://brill.com/view/journals/rupo/8/2/article-p127_2.xml
The article also challenges the ethnonationalist explanation of the war. Its defenders would have to argue that the very “identity” issues that the negotiating parties considered least important for a peace agreement were supposedly the most important reasons for starting the war
“Putin’s blitzkrieg had failed; that was clear by early March. Perhaps he was now willing to cut his losses if he got his longest-standing demand: that Ukraine renounce its NATO aspirations and never host NATO forces on its territory. If he could not control the entire country, at least he could ensure his most basic security interests, stem the hemorrhaging of Russia’s economy, and restore the country’s international reputation.
Second, the drafts contain several articles that were added to the treaty at Russia’s insistence but were not part of the communiqué and related to matters that Ukraine refused to discuss. These require Ukraine to ban “fascism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, and aggressive nationalism”—and, to that end, to repeal six Ukrainian laws (fully or in part) that dealt, broadly, with contentious aspects of Soviet-era history, in particular the role of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.
It is easy to see why Ukraine would resist letting Russia determine its policies on historical memory, particularly in the context of a treaty on security guarantees. And the Russians knew these provisions would make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to accept the rest of the treaty. They might, therefore, be seen as poison pills.
It is also possible, however, that the provisions were intended to allow Putin to save face. For example, by forcing Ukraine to repeal statutes that condemned the Soviet past and cast the Ukrainian nationalists who fought the Red Army during World War II as freedom fighters, the Kremlin could argue that it had achieved its stated goal of “denazification,” even though the original meaning of that phrase may well have been the replacement of Zelensky’s government.
In the end, it remains unclear whether these provisions would have been a deal-breaker. The lead Ukrainian negotiator, Arakhamia, later downplayed their importance.”
The evidence is still consistent with the class conflict explanation. Putin could have agreed to the compromise (and may now be genuinely sending negotiating signals) precisely because he had already achieved his main transformative goals for Russia.
Last but not least. Although the authors reject the cartoonish argument that the West “forced” Zelenskyi to abandon the deal, they do not deny the “agency” of Boris Johnson and the US elite and their share of responsibility for the failure of the talks.
“[I]nstead of embracing the Istanbul communiqué and the subsequent diplomatic process, the West ramped up military aid to Kyiv and increased the pressure on Russia, including through an ever-tightening sanctions regime.
Notwithstanding Putin’s manipulative spin, Arakhamia was pointing to a real problem: the communiqué described a multilateral framework that would require Western willingness to engage diplomatically with Russia and consider a genuine security guarantee for Ukraine. Neither was a priority for the United States and its allies at the time.
In their public remarks, the Americans were never quite so dismissive of diplomacy as Johnson had been. But they did not appear to consider it central to their response to Russia’s invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv two weeks after Johnson, mostly to coordinate greater military support. As Blinken put it at a press conference afterward, “The strategy that we’ve put in place—massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia, solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts—is having real results.”
The Western officials who dissuaded Zelenskyi from the peace deal and instead fueled exaggerated expectations of Ukraine’s victory with promises of support “for as long as it takes” surely understood the consequences and who will pay most of the price. The authors attribute it to the risk aversion to commit to the war with Russia. Ironically, we ended up in a situation where the risk of a world war with Russia has only become higher than it was in 2022, not to speak of hundreds of thousands of lost lives and urban destruction.
Was it just a mistake to underestimate Russia? As with Putin’s decision to launch the invasion, it was probably a combination of mistake and rational interest. As I feared back in March 2022, if the West ONLY sends weapons and escalates sanctions without pursuing a diplomatic path, it means that at least a part of the Western elites was actually interested in this war.
https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/46153/stopping-the-war-is-the-absolute-priority
VOLODYMYR ISHCHENKO?
It would be interesting to know more about what factions his views might represent, his bio material on the sites gives me some indications, but it’s not very clear. He seems to defy some of the standard views of the west, where Biden admin was constantly harping that Russia was going to attack Ukraine (projecting? because that’s what the neo-cons desired) where as zElenskyy kept playing down the risk, so this seems to put him into that camp.
Then he writes “What may be relevant here is the possible pressure of a better organized, mobilized, and armed minority camp against a fragmented, disorganized, and disarticulated majority.” which again places him in zEleksyy’s pre-election camp. I disagree with the “disarticulated” majority, they were hardly disarticulated if they could face down the Rights Sector, the problem was their power base was outside of Kiev, but more importantly they did not have control of the mass media organs, and zElenskyy is nothing if not a creature of mass media.