Zelensky was forced to “face reality” by the peace process with Russia

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is fighting to save a stalled peace process that was supposed to end a slow-fire conflict with Russian support forces in the country’s far east.

Moscow is massive military accumulation on the eastern border of Ukraine and occupied Crimea last month, followed by a partial troop withdrawal, was “from the Kremlin’s point of view a clear success,” Kurt Volker, former U.S. Special Representative to Ukraine, he wrote last week. Russia’s noise left “Ukraine with a vulnerable appearance, as the west had avoided a demonstration of military strength and [Vladimir] Putin has “strengthened his position” in the region.

Zelensky, who was elected in 2019 with the promise of ending the war in the Donbas region, has few options to break the deadlock, as he has failed to galvanize Kiev’s Western allies behind new economic sanctions against Russia and with Washington’s willingness to engage in a new unclear diplomatic effort.

The ex-humorist is struggling even to get Putin to sit at the table for peace talks alongside leaders of Western countries who support Kiev.

Zelensky has been forced to acknowledge that the Russian president may not want peace for now in Donbas, where 14,000 fighters and civilians have died, unless Kiev accepts politically unacceptable terms for any Ukrainian leader.

A senior Ukrainian official admitted that Zelensky had taken two years to “face reality.”

“Ukraine is committed to peace and is willing to do everything in its power to achieve that peace,” an adviser to the president said. “However, it takes two parties to want peace and Moscow’s recent belligerent behavior casts significant doubt on its intention,” the adviser added.

Zelensky he said the Financial Times last week wanted the US and UK to join the so-called Norman group of Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia to help break the deadlock.

He also called for changes to the Minsk peace agreement negotiated by Normandy Four, which has not been implemented, with Kiev and Moscow at the helm over deadlines and sequencing. But the Kremlin refuses to renegotiate the deal. “There is no way to change it without, in fact, ending it,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week in response to Zelensky’s appeal to the FT.

Meanwhile, Paris and Berlin, fear of moving away from the Minsk agreement could provoke Moscow. Removing it would also make the sustainability of EU sanctions against Russia difficult.

Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, admitted last week in a television interview that Kiev did not have a chosen diplomatic strategy.

“We need to keep working in all directions and in all formats,” he said. “Because in the end we don’t know what format peace will bring to our land, when we can return all our territories, all our people and end the war,” Yermak added.

In his first year as president, Zelensky won a quick victory after negotiations in Paris with Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He convinced Russia and its separatist representatives who controlled two broken regions in Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial core, to exchange hundreds of prisoners of war. However, the process has stalled and a new ceasefire agreed in July 2020 was broken earlier this year.

Kiev insists it is not obliged to grant permanent autonomy to broken areas, for fear that such a status would frustrate its aspirations to join the EU and NATO. Moscow and its “republics” of Donbas power have refused to cede control to Kiev over the region and the border before elections can be held as a step towards reintegration with Ukraine.

Zelensky last month sparked individual talks with Putin, something he has avoided so far during the conflict. Putin rejected Zelensky’s request to meet on the front lines and offered to discuss bilateral relations, not the Donbas war, if Zelensky arrived in Moscow. Putin added that on the Donbas issue, Zelensky should hold talks with leaders of Russian-backed separatist republics, which the Ukrainian president refuses to do.

“Putin has shown that he has no desire to produce anything of interest to Zelensky, let alone reach a peace agreement,” said Danylo Lubkivsky, director of the Kiev Security Forum. “Only collective international pressure can force Putin to liberate these captive Ukrainian territories.”

Zelensky hopes a bigger role for U.S. President Joe Biden, alongside France and Germany or in bilateral talks with Putin, could help push Moscow toward compromise.

“It is strategically important to bring Biden. . . The United States should return to the table to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity in two ways, Crimea and Donbas, because that is a matter of global security, “Lubkivsky added.

But Kiev is unclear to what extent Washington will commit to a new peace initiative. While Biden is a friend of Ukraine, his administration contains Obama-era officials who were skeptical about the deepest involvement of the United States six years ago. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Kiev on May 5.

How the United States and other Western powers could help Ukraine regain its territorial integrity was an “annoying problem,” George Kent, a senior State Department official, told the Kiev Security Forum last week . The challenge, he said, was to “try to change the calculation of costs and their behavior in Russia.”

One way the U.S. could increase pressure on Moscow would be to extend U.S. sanctions to the issuance of dollar-denominated Russian debt in holding that debt, Kent said.

But changing Russian behavior “is not easy. And no one has come up with a winning solution. “

Sarah Lain, a researcher at the Kiev-based Royal United Services Institute, said even expressions of Western solidarity with Kiev were important. Many capitals now see the Ukraine-Russia conflict as “part of their Russian policy” rather than a bilateral dispute.

“This is important for Zelensky’s position,” he added.

Maria Zolkina, an analyst at the Kiev-based Democratic Initiatives Foundation, said that “the only chance Russia under Putin could return control of these territories in terms acceptable to Ukraine is if Russia is under deep financial and technological constraints. “.

“But the problem for the West is that no one will impose these sanctions, worrying that it will only increase Russia’s hostilities,” he added.

Some Ukrainian analysts and officials resign themselves to a long and frozen conflict and say that Kiev’s best strategy is to rebuild its economy and modernize its state. A Ukrainian official described it as the “West German strategy”: to focus on enduring Putin and forging peace after a new leadership came to power in Russia, but from a position of relative strength.