Excerpt from Die Welt (courtesy of Geoffrey Roberts and John Attfield)

Moderators: Good morning from Berlin to Kyiv to Christoph Wanner. Christoph, let’s look at this new attempt to bring peace to Ukraine. What can we take away from Miami? What details are we hearing that could actually influence Moscow’s decision to say yes or no?

Wanner: There is increasing news here in Ukraine that no agreement could be reached in Miami on the really important points. This mainly concerns the possible cession of territory. There is repeated talk of the Russians wanting the Donbas, i.e. the two Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. And the Ukrainians are said to have stuck to their guns and continued to say: ‘No way. That’s completely contrary to our constitution. We won’t give it up voluntarily, we won’t back down, we won’t vacate the whole thing.’ NATO membership, or possible NATO membership, must be mentioned. The Ukrainians do not want to be deprived of their right to become a NATO member. And the Russians say that this is a taboo subject, completely out of the question. The Ukrainians must renounce this. Security guarantees for the Ukrainians – here, too, no agreement seems to have been reached yet. So, on the really essential points, there is still disagreement between the Americans and the Ukrainians. And now, of course, the Russian war bloggers are quick to comment on this. As is so often the case, they are always the first to break the news, and the tenor is then: ‘If the Ukrainians don’t give in, this war will continue. I often read things like ’dead end”, which is where we still find ourselves. But let’s wait and see what the Americans will discuss with Vladimir Putin. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are flying to Moscow today, and tomorrow there will be a meeting with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, and then we will know more. Perhaps the Russians are willing to make compromises that we don’t know about yet. I can’t imagine it. I think the key issues for Putin are territorial issues and the NATO question. If he gets Donbas and assurances that Ukraine will not become a NATO member, he might be willing to talk about many other things. 

Moderators: Christoph, you say if he gets the Donbas. The American broadcaster NBC is now reporting that even if the Ukrainians, i.e. Zelensky, were to support this decision, the military would refuse to give up this territory. How likely is a kind of military coup?

Wanner: The news comes from the American media outlet NBC, and their colleagues apparently spoke to Ukrainian military personnel and asked them: What would you do if you received the order to evacuate Donbas? And the answer from many of them was apparently: We will not evacuate, that is out of the question. I asked around among my Ukrainian colleagues this morning because I myself have too little knowledge of how the military would react. And my colleagues assured me that the high-ranking Ukrainian military officers have no political agenda of their own, are not politicians, have no ambitions and will do exactly what Zelensky orders them to do. And so they would probably evacuate the Donbas. Of course, there are always hardliners, there are always hawks, even in the military, ultra-nationalists who do not want to give the Russians a single square centimetre. That’s clear, but there are also many Ukrainian soldiers, and this is what I know from my own experience and hear time and again when we are in the east of the country, who, I have to say it as it is, please forgive me, are simply fed up, who just want this war, this dying, to stop. And these men may be willing to make painful compromises.