This weekend saw one of the largest aerial assaults on Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began, bringing renewed assurances from US President Joe Biden that Russian President Vladimir Putin “must be stopped”. With Ukraine running out of soldiers and surface-to-air missiles and western support in a variety of guises dwindling, who knows at what point the Russian leader might be prepared to halt military operations. Ukraine’s much-touted summer offensive has meanwhile turned into a dour winter defensive.
The question of whether this war was always an act of colonial aggression and expansion or a defensive response to the perceived threat of Ukraine’s possible Nato membership will be for the historians. (In any case, whether those latter claims were genuine or merely a diabolical Kremlin pretext, rightly or wrongly, the West provided Putin with a handy propaganda tool.)
Until Friday’s horrifying assault, Biden seemed to be discreetly pushing for some sort of negotiated settlement. As the wisest and most pragmatic of heads in the West have been saying, the day will dawn when both sides recognise that neither can win and talking offers the only progress.
The question, of course, is on what terms, and here it seems the West, inflamed by its own rhetoric, missed a priceless opportunity last year, and in doing so made Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hand an almost impossible one to play.
In a recent interview, mysteriously little-noticed in the West, one of Zelensky’s closest allies, Davyd Arakhamia, confirmed at talks in Istanbul two months after Russia invaded, Putin offered Zelensky a deal that would guarantee Ukrainian security in exchange for the country remaining neutral and giving up on Nato membership. Other clauses included lifting the ban on the Russian language in Ukraine, Donbas remaining in Ukraine but as an autonomous region, the UN and Germany overseeing security agreements, and a pledge to talk seriously about how to resolve the Crimea problem. The existence of the outline of a deal has been confirmed by former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.
There were obstacles, of course. Any talks with Russia require the most stringently policed guarantees. A pause in hostilities could be cynically designed and used, by either side, to buy time and regroup. Renouncing any thought of Nato membership would require a change in the Ukrainian constitution, and so on. But the fact that there was such an offer at all is sharply at odds with Putin’s current position – namely that he won’t stop until he achieves his stated goals. In other words, the possibility of negotiating seriously for peace feels further away now than it must have felt to our leaders in April 2022. Had that deal been accepted, at a time when Putin must have realised how much he had bitten off, thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives might have been saved.
The new and most interesting aspect of the interview with Arakhamia, one of Zelensky’s leading negotiators, is the role of Boris Johnson. Arakhamia says Ukraine would probably not have accepted such a deal, which presumably would have looked like surrender, but took advice. What is disquieting is that Arakhamia said of Britain’s former PM: “When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we wouldn’t sign anything with them at all, and that we should just fight.” Arakhamia also said Ukrainian neutrality was “the biggest thing for (Moscow)”. A spokesperson for Boris Johnson rejected the claims last month: “The Ukrainian decision to fight is not to do with Boris – it is to do with the iron resolve of President Zelensky and the people of Ukraine.”
Those who doubted the wisdom of antagonising the Kremlin by expanding Nato will be unsurprised by both the West’s witless wish to rattle Putin’s cage and by Arakhamia’s confirmation that Ukraine’s desire to join Nato is the central issue for Moscow. Johnson’s office said, in another context some weeks after he rubbished the proposed deal, that there should be no “negotiations with Russia on terms that gave credence to the Kremlin’s false narrative for the invasion”, while stressing this was a decision for the Ukrainian government. (“False narrative”, by the way, seems to be a pretentious way of saying there is a disagreement: on that, at least, all can agree.)
It would be a cheap blow, especially following this weekend’s carnage, to suggest that Johnson sought to scupper the deal because it would have prevented him playing a Churchillian war hero’s role in seeking the liberation of Ukraine. Surely no Prime Minister would be quite that solipsistic at the expense of so many lives? But it does invite speculation as to the extent of the West’s influence.
It also raises the question as to whether a serviceable off-ramp, a pride-saving retreat, amenable to the Russians, could have been explored or whether Britain, amid the hawks, was determined to teach Putin a lesson. Has diplomacy really not evolved beyond this, to a state where innocent lives are more than mere collateral? Whether this lesson would be achieved by offering covert support, cheering Ukraine’s brave fighters (purportedly from the sidelines but in fact using British armaments) and hoping somehow the Russians might be defeated and Ukraine admitted to Nato, is unclear.
The more time that passes, the more it seems the West missed a huge trick, failing to take the opportunity offered when Putin realised he had bitten off more than he could chew. Recent reports suggest Putin put out feelers again in the autumn of last year, after the Russian army had been forced into an embarrassing retreat in the north-east. Such reports invite the question: what terms would Britain, or the West more broadly, accept as a basis for talks? Can we now be confident that any brief moments when peace is there for the taking will be recognised? The Foreign Office – ever anxious to claim this is an entirely Ukrainian decision – refers such questions to Zelensky’s 10 point plan, in which, admittedly, Moscow has shown no interest.
Lavrov has said the offer of last spring would not be repeated because too much has changed since then. But if by some miracle, or some courageous prompting from the West, Russia showed a bit of leg and made a comparable offer now, what would David Cameron say? “Let’s fight”, as Johnson did? “No, we want Ukraine in Nato”? “No, Crimea is Ukrainian”? Cameron’s own record on foreign affairs is uneven, but what is to be lost by leaving a few doors open to Moscow?
After all, isn’t some sort of guaranteed, formalised version of the pre-war status quo what the world wants, rather than indulging an ideological post-Cold War fetish about extending Nato’s immediate borders with Russia further? Who, apart from the arms dealers, really thinks that is the answer (and I write as an admirer of Nato)? We thought Boris Johnson was no zealot, but his bolstering of President Zelensky encouraged him in to a position where almost any negotiation would look like humiliation.
Zelensky’s poll ratings are still very high, though they have dipped a little. With the Ukrainian people showing signs of exhaustion, with some Western pledges of arms not being met and with the world increasingly looking elsewhere (including Gaza and perhaps soon Taiwan), talk of “victory” becomes harder to sustain, yet for now that remains the Zelensky message.
The recent emergence of a possible challenger to Zelensky, Oleksii Arestovych, may point the way for the President. Arestovych, nobody’s idea of a peacenik, who in 2019 predicted the Russian invasion, says his President has become a hostage of his own propaganda. “He thinks not about the national interest, but about his own position.”
As i reported recently, Arestovych is scathing of the role Washington and London played in offering Ukraine enough military support to weaken Russia but not enough to win the war, while allowing Russia “to rain cruise missiles on our heads”.
Arestovych, who has announced that he would stand against Zelensky were presidential elections to be held, thinks the terms for ending the war should now be discussed: “The positive aims for both sides have been lost and now there are only negative goals.”
If Zelensky needs to give his people an excuse for starting to talk to the Russians, the alleged backsliding of the West is as good as any, and he might even see some mileage in stealing Arestovych’s clothes.
If a bit of stage management is what is needed to stop the slaughter and let the talking start, then should it not be given a chance? The West has a responsibility here. Do we have the diplomats or the politicians with the freedom of manoeuvre and the magnanimity to make it happen?
We can but hope. Cameron at least looks the part as he walks on the world stage. We may soon find out if he is big enough to look beyond Putin’s murderous behaviour towards a greater good.
A week ago, the New York Times reported that Putin has again been intimating that he would be open to talks about an armistice and perhaps to a subsequent deal. Is this the moment? And if so, will it be seized, or will the West again prefer to put pointless pride to the fore, remaining permanently, pointlessly scandalised by Putin, and lock itself into Boris Johnson’s parody of a Churchillian stance?
