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bne February 2022
reported in “Putin’s babies”, he did something about that
a decade later. Putin warned in his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech that Russia would push back if its security concerns were ignored and he started modernising the army in 2012, annexed the Crimea in 2014 and is now moving up troops that could invade Ukraine in 2021. You can draw a straight line through all these points.
What did he say?
Putin has just done it again. During the Munich speech he brought up the broken verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev of no Nato eastern expansion. And he has mentioned them again in the last month several times.
The year after Munich in 2008 the Russian Foreign Ministry drew up detailed plans for a new pan-European security deal that included a fair specific framework proposal released by the Russian Foreign Ministry in 2009. Putin has now brought that up again, demanding “legal guarantees” from Nato that it will not expand further (i.e. allow Ukraine or Georgia to join). The Russian Foreign Ministry followed up a few days after
the two-hour December 7 virtual summit with Biden with a concrete five point list of demands and on December 15 the MFA sent even more extensive details on what a security deal could look like. Clearly the MFA has been working on this for some time and has a very clear idea of what it wants.
There is a general assumption that the current war talk will die away in the New Year. Daniel Salter, head of Equity Strategy and head of Research at Renaissance Capital, said during a conference call on December 16 that Russia is one of the more prospective investment stories in 2022, as the house view is that Russia won’t invade Ukraine and that things will “calm down”.
It’s clear to everyone that Putin is dead set against Ukraine joining Nato, but the assumption is that he is satisfied with the frozen conflict he has caused in the Donbas because that guarantees Ukraine can never join Nato. So after the current posturing is over the status quo will resume.
And that is the bit that has changed.
New Deal
If you listen to what Putin has been saying he is no longer happy with the status quo of maintaining a costly and embarrassing insurrection in the Donbas. He wants a resolution of the Nato question. He wants the promises made to Gorbachev fulfilled and guaranteed. He wants the status of Ukraine in Europe defined. And he wants the West to stop interfering in Russia’s affairs.
Again, all this was laid out in black and white by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in his new rules of the game speech in February and again a month later when he said Russia would break off diplomatic relations with Europe if the West continued its policy of sanctioning Russia. To underscore
Opinion 87 the point the Kremlin did break off diplomatic relations with
Nato in October.
Things won’t calm down in the New Year if the West does not take these demands seriously. Russia will not withdraw its troops from the Ukrainian border regions until meaningful progress has been made on starting these talks. Lavrov made it clear in his speech that Russia has set the bar at zero tolerance and is not prepared to compromise or make concessions with the West unless the West moves first.
In the meantime, Russia will continue its military preparations. It will continue to build up its economic and military ties with Beijing, which has exactly the same agenda. Pointedly eight days after Putin’s summit with Biden, Putin held the same online summit with China’s President Xi Jinping where they pledged their mutual friendship on what was clearly intended as a message to Washington: you cannot divide the Russian and Chinese “problems” unless we are prepared to co-operate.
Thrashing out a new security deal will be extremely difficult. Both sides of the House in the US are strongly critical of Russia and after the Afghanistan debacle Biden is keen to show that the US will stand by its allies, said Renaissance Capital’s chief economist Charles Robinson at the same briefing. That means supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and maintaining Nato’s compelling deterrent.
However, it appears that Biden has already agreed to a more comprehensive deal with Putin than was revealed in the post December 7 summit comments.
Biden backed talks between four “leading members” of Nato and the Kremlin to discuss Putin’s demands within days. Putin restored all the machinery of diplomatic relations with the
US that have been frozen since the summer following
“If you listen to what Putin has been saying he is no longer happy with the status quo of maintaining a costly and embarrassing insurrection in the Donbas. He wants a resolution of the Nato question”
a row. A $200mn US military aid package to Ukraine has been frozen. Harsh sanctions that were included in the US defence- spending bill by Senator Bob Menendez were quietly removed before the bill passed in the same week as the summit. The Russian Foreign Ministry has said it is “not opposed” to the
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