As Putin floats peace terms, US-Ukraine call for prolonged war
Russia has offered its most concrete public proposal for ending the war. But Kyiv and Washington have different plans.
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Ahead of an international Ukraine “peace summit” in Switzerland to which he was not invited, Russian President Vladimir Putin laid out his most concrete public proposal to date for ending the war.
Ukraine, Putin said in a June 14th speech to Russian foreign ministry officials, should withdraw all its forces from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, regions that Russia has claimed to annex despite not fully controlling. The Russian leader also called on Kyiv to renounce its bid to join NATO and commit to permanent neutrality, as its founding constitution previously enshrined, and to never acquire nuclear weapons. If Ukraine were to accept those terms, Putin said, “our side will follow an order to cease fire and start negotiations... expeditiously.”
For Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his Western sponsors, Putin’s offer is a non-starter.
Zelensky, who has officially ruled out talks with Moscow so long as Putin is in power, dismissed what he described as a “revival of Nazism” similar to Hitler’s conquest of Czechoslovakia. If Ukraine were to cede those regions, Zelensky argued, Putin would attempt to take more territory, “because Putin is following the same route” as Nazi Germany. According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz, “everyone knows that this proposal wasn’t meant seriously,” and therefore would not even be discussed. Russia’s terms, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, would leave Ukraine “vulnerable to future Russian aggression down the road.” Vice President Kamala Harris added: “He is not calling for negotiations. He is calling for surrender.”
In fact, as he explicitly stated, Putin was indeed calling for negotiations. And as RAND Corporation analyst Samuel Charap noted, the only way to test his sincerity, and potential flexibility, is to reciprocate. “What we know for sure is that the declared public position has hardened,” Charap said. “That doesn’t mean that necessarily, if they were to sit down, they wouldn’t budge from this.”
As to why Putin’s position has hardened, his speech gave ample reasons. In his lengthy remarks, Putin listed off multiple instances where the West has shunned diplomacy and chosen confrontation. These include the pledge of no further NATO expansion to the east at the end of the Cold War; the February 2014 power-sharing agreement to leave Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in power, thwarted by ultra-nationalist violence that culminated in a coup cheered on by the Obama White House; and Ukraine’s refusal to implement the Minsk Accords, the pact to end the post-coup government’s war against Russian-backed Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region.
Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion, Putin insisted, “was nothing else but an operation to coerce the Ukrainian regime into peace.” Rather than an attempt to take over Ukraine, he said, Russian “troops were there in order to push the Ukrainian side to negotiations, try to find acceptable solutions and thereby end the war Kiev had started against Donbass back in 2014, and resolve issues that pose a threat to the security of Russia.”
One does not have to endorse Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine to recognize that coercing diplomacy was indeed a Russian goal. Just before invading, Russia submitted draft treaties that the US and NATO forcefully rejected. Right after invading, Russia began negotiations with Ukraine within three days, culminating in the tentative agreement reached in Istanbul that April. As Ukrainian negotiator Oleksandr Chalyi later acknowledged, the two sides “managed to find a very real compromise” in Istanbul, and “were very close” to finalizing a “peaceful settlement.”
Yet that settlement was quashed after Ukraine’s Western sponsors refused to offer the security guarantees that would underpin it, and then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Kyiv to instead “keep fighting.” (When it comes to Istanbul, the New York Times has broken its own vow of silence on those negotiations and published an article with illuminating detail – and a new Ukrainian excuse for why their side walked away – that I will address in a follow-up article). As the Washington Post explained at the time: “For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.”
More than two years and hundreds of thousands of dead later, NATO’s leader in Washington is determined that Ukrainians keep fighting and dying.
Ahead of the Switzerland “peace summit,” Biden and Zelensky announced a new 10-year security deal that the Ukrainian president hailed as “historic” and “the strongest agreement between Ukraine and the US since our independence.” Zelensky also claimed that the pact would bring Ukraine closer into NATO: “The philosophy of our security agreement is, in fact, the philosophy of the alliance. And that is why the issue of NATO is covered through the text of the agreement."
Yet the deal does not offer Ukraine any new steps to join NATO, nor commit the US to defend it in the event of an attack. The US has also not promised any additional funding for Ukraine, only a pledge to work with Congress to achieve it. The deal could also be terminated by a future president. Biden’s only new monetary commitment came in the form of an EU-backed $50 billion loan to be financed by stolen Russian bank reserves – and possibly, Ukrainian state assets that will be sold off to the highest bidder.
While the White House hailed its new security pact as “a bridge to Ukraine’s eventual membership in the NATO Alliance,” Biden made clear that he foresees a different path. In an interview with Time Magazine, Biden explained that for Ukraine, peace “doesn't mean NATO, they are part of NATO.” Instead, he said, “it means we have a relationship with them like we do with other countries, where we supply weapons so they can defend themselves in the future.” As a Senator and Vice President, he reminded his interviewers, he called out Ukraine’s “significant corruption,” and was “not prepared to support the NATOization of Ukraine.”
Having let his son Hunter take a lucrative gas company board seat in Ukraine shortly after his administration backed a coup there, Biden is the last person to be lecturing on matters of corruption. But his words underscore an even more cynical goal: as I wrote last July, the White House has used the “open door” of Ukraine’s “eventual membership” in NATO as a back door to fight Russia for eight years and running.
With his new comments, Biden is affirming that despite his lofty promises to Ukraine, the White House only remains committed to exploiting it. If that weren’t clear enough, Biden followed up by shunning Zelensky and skipping his “peace summit” — even though it would have been an easy stop in Switzerland on his way home from the G7 summit in Italy.
Despite Biden’s open disdain, Zelensky remains on board with his agenda. “If we don’t make progress [on the battlefield] this year, then we will try again next year,” Zelensky recently said, according to a European diplomat who spoke to the New York Times. “And if we don’t make progress next year, we will try again the following year, and the one after that.”
So long as the US remains committed to bleeding Russia rather than negotiating with it, Zelensky will undoubtedly have more opportunities to “try again” at the cost of continued mass casualties and lost territory.