Ukraine: Negotiations Yesterday and Tomorrow

It may never be too late, but every day that passes runs the risk of being one too many. It is not yet clear to us that bloody conflict is almost never the best way to resolve geopolitical disputes, but there are glimmers of realism sparking somewhere in the world of Euro-American leadership. Granite confidence in the outcome of the war in Ukraine is giving way to more measured assumptions.

In Brussels, Josep Borrell, who has made military support for Kiev the basis of his “diplomatic” actions, confident of Zelensky’s victory on the battlefield, now prepares to await the outcome of looming variables moving into the November post-election period in the USA, perhaps a turning point in the negotiations. NATO’s number one, Jens Stoltenberg, along with the Ukrainian president, having taken into account the difficulties of Kiev’s troops, can now only express, as a form of maximum encouragement, the hope that “it is not too late for a Ukrainian victory.” A hint of realism is also evident in the words of Anthony Blinken, who from Riyadh, once a comfort zone for all of Washington’s strategies, makes it clear that “once Russia demonstrates that it genuinely wants to negotiate, we will definitely be there, and I believe the Ukrainians will be there as well.”

It doesn’t take too many neurons to remember that such a condition already existed two years ago, a month after the Russian army entered Ukraine. It was a negotiating table in Istanbul, organized by Turkish President Erdogan, that was one step away from an agreement, which would stop the fighting, putting Ukraine’s neutrality (outside NATO) and its territorial integrity on the scales, except for Donetsk and Luhansk, but retaining Kherson and Zaporozhye, and freezing the status of Crimea for several decades. A solution that suited Moscow and Kiev, but not some inflammatory Western leader. Samuel Charap, a very bright American author at the RAND Corporation, and Sergei Radchenko of Johns Hopkins University have just reconstructed in Foreign Relations magazine, using first-hand documents, the many steps taken to reach an agreement between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators after the very first weeks of the war. And the clandestine work that led to them being stranded.

Also, on the basis of these reconstructions, History will place the correct burden of responsibility on those who wanted to miss the opportunity to avoid continuing conflict. This will be an unexpected result for many, especially in Europe, where the architects of its impoverishment, increased subjugation, and appalling rearmament at the national level will have some difficulty in explaining solutions that have already proven to be doomed to failure.

Will this really be the case? The recent past teaches us this. Even when History is used ineptly as a weapon of war. Benoit Breville writes about this in his April editorial. “For two years, the war in Ukraine was compared to World War I because it also took place in muddy trenches; to the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962), which threatened humanity with nuclear catastrophe; to all the external interventions of the USSR (Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, Kabul in 1979); with the Iran-Iraq war between the two neighboring states (1980-1988); with Kosovo, which was trying to free itself from the grip of Serbia… Vladimir Zelensky and his communicators are succeeding in this little game. The 1933 famine, Stalin’s Great Terror, the conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Syria, and even the Chernobyl disaster: each historical tragedy makes him think of invading his country. The Ukrainian president also knows how to tailor his appeals to his audience. Before the US Congress, he spoke about the attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In front of Belgian deputies, he mentioned the Battle of Ypres. In Madrid, he talked about the Spanish Civil War, the Guernica massacre; and in the Czech Republic, it was about the Prague Spring.”

The director of Le Monde Diplomatique does not limit himself to stigmatizing the Ukrainian president. He questions the recurring vices of the Western ruling classes since World War II. Because, he explains, this avalanche of analogies has more than just a rhetorical effect. The choice of comparisons sometimes affects the strategic decisions themselves. Political scientist Yuen Foong Khong demonstrated how the memory of the Munich Conference permeated the thinking of American political leaders during the Vietnam War. Not only their speeches, but their reflections, their debates, right down to justifying in their eyes the need for military intervention. If they had thought about the French experience in Indochina in the 1950s and the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, perhaps they would have perceived the country as impregnable, which would have made them more cautious. But “political leaders are humble historians; their repertoire of historical parallels is limited, so they choose and apply the wrong analogies.”

Instead, professional historians have as their guiding star a sequence of actions that leads to a (dramatic) revelation of facts. For the future, it’s worth mentioning a small passage from John Mearsheimer’s latest essay, “Why Great Powers Go to War with Each Other.” According to the University of Chicago’s Mearsheimer, one of the greatest contemporary theorists of international relations, the chronological decline of events explains why we have reached this point.

“The conflict began in February 2014, six years after NATO announced Ukraine’s membership plan. Putin has tried to resolve the dispute primarily through diplomacy, attempting to persuade the USA, which sponsored Kiev’s entry into the alliance, to back down. On the contrary, Washington decided to work even harder, arming and training the Ukrainian army and inviting it to participate in NATO military maneuvers. Fearing that Ukraine would become its de facto member, Moscow sent a letter to the transatlantic organization and President Joseph Biden on December 17, 2021, asking for written guarantees that Ukraine would remain outside the Alliance and observe strict neutrality. To which Secretary of State Anthony Blinken responded on January 26, 2022: ‘There is no change, there will be no change.’ A month later, Russia attacked Ukraine.”