Page 55 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine April 2025

bne April 2025
Opinion 55
making damage control particularly tricky at the moment.
Sadly for Western liberalism, it is now left to far-right governments of Victor Orban and Donald Trump to deliver the bitter truth. That’s because they have never been invested in the risky enterprise of challenging a major nuclear power to what Western politicians, like Marco Rubio and former British prime- minister Boris Johnson are now openly calling a proxy war.
What politicians and lobbyists who helped to derail Istanbul agreements in the spring of 2022 (and Minsk agreements before that) can’t possibly admit, is that Ukraine’s terrible sacrifice was in vain.
Hence the attempts to make the war last for another year or two – in the hope that some miraculous black swan event,
be it a sudden economic crisis or military uprising along the lines of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin's putsch in 2023, will bring Russia to its knees. None of that seems conceivable as things stand now.
The benchmark for what Ukraine would see as a success
or failure in the full-out war was spelled out in March 2022 by Oleksiy Arestovych who was Yermak’s aide and one
of Ukraine’s top spokesman on all things related to war. Anything worse than the conditions of the Minsk agreements, which ended the hot phase of the conflict in 2015, would
be deemed as Ukraine’s defeat, he said a few weeks into the full-out war and at the time when Istanbul talks were in full swing. Minsk agreements is what Kyiv effectively rejected
in the run-up to full-out invasion, perhaps believing that it was calling Putin’s bluff or that the invasion was doomed
to failure.
Ukraine is further away from achieving these goals today than any time during the three years of the full-out conflict. That creates a major headache for war enthusiasts who spent three years promoting delusional expectations in order to make Ukrainians fight a losing battle – effectively for nothing. The bitter pill Ukraine and Europe will have to take will need to be explained to the voters. More than a few political careers will unravel as the blame game ensues.
For Russia, on the other hand, it is the moment when its skilful diplomats, led by foreign policy veteran Sergey Lavrov and the above-mentioned Ushakov, may help it seal what has been achieved on the battlefield over the last three years.
Dancing around ceasefire
On the face of it, ceasefire is disadvantageous for the Russians who have been slowly advancing all along the frontline since the end of 2023, with the notable exception of the debacle in Kursk region where the Ukrainians managed to seize a chunk of rural territory. By the time Jeddah talks happened, however, this area had been all but liberated with remaining Ukrainian troops either trapped without supplies in Russian territory or fleeing across the border.
But the 30-day limit on the ceasefire, negotiated by Yermak and Trump’s envoy, may provide an opening for Putin. This term is short enough for any major changes with regards to military capability on either side. There is not much Moscow is losing by agreeing to a ceasefire while signalling its willingness to cooperate with Trump. If nothing is achieved, it can resume the offensive. At the same time, it will incentivise Trump to exert more pressure on Ukraine and extract more concessions.
Besides, agreeing to talk about a ceasefire is not the same as agreeing to a ceasefire per se. Ceasefire talks will be difficult and highly technical – the separation of troops and effective monitoring of ceasefire violations proved a major sticking point already when the Minsk agreements were still alive. Both sides may eventually pull out blaming each other for failing
to achieve a result. Ceasefire talks may drag on for months while the Russian army will continue advancing along the frontline. Most crucially, Moscow will be able to bring up any kind of conditions in the meantime steering the conversation towards its desired format of long-term settlement.
Over many months, the Kremlin repeatedly said that it is interested in a comprehensive peace treaty not just with Ukraine but also with the West - not in a ceasefire that could result in the Korean-style freezing of the conflict.
That suggests that it will try to at least agree upon the
general framework of the future peace negotiations before committing to end hostilities. Russia insists on reviving the Istanbul framework which envisaged Ukraine’s neutrality
and limiting the size of its armed forces. In addition, Moscow insists on keeping the territory it has occupied so far or even on the Ukrainian withdrawal from the rest of the four regions Russia has formally annexed after sham referendums in 2022. The latter demand shouldn’t be taken too seriously - it is the reaction to similarly unrealistic demands by the Ukrainian/ Western side, like deployment of NATO “peacekeepers”.
Peace according to Putin
Territory is not what Putin is fighting for in Ukraine - it is a tool of punishment for intransigence and a bargaining chip in negotiations. What Moscow is going to be focused on in the talks both prior to and after the prospective ceasefire is a new security architecture in Europe that will set a red line for NATO’s eastward expansion for decades to come.
As for Ukraine, multiple statements and leaks suggest
that Moscow will be satisfied with it attaining the status similar to Finland’s and Austria’s after World War II. That
will effectively mean a return to the status quo prior to the Maidan revolution in 2014 when Ukraine was geopolitically equidistant from Russia and the West. Incidentally, it was also more democratic and inclusive.
But Moscow will insist on the removal of all kinds of NATO infrastructure, specifically the CIA listening stations which
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