With Ukraine taking firmer stance, peace talks grind to a halt
After weeks of trying to hammer out a peace deal, negotiators for Russia and Ukraine appear further apart than at any other point in the nearly 3month-long war, with the talks having collapsed in a thicket of public recriminations.
Rustem Umerov, a top Ukrainian negotiator, responded by saying that Russia was operating with “fakes and lies.”
“We are defending ourselves,” Mr. Umerov said in an interview. “If Russia wants to get out, they can get out to their borders even today. But they are not doing it.”
On Tuesday, both sides further played down the prospects of a deal. Another Ukrainian negotiator, Mykhailo Podolyak, issued a statement saying that the talks were “on pause” and that given Russia’s faltering offensive, the Kremlin “will not achieve any goals.” And Andrei Rudenko, a Russian deputy foreign minister, told reporters that “Ukraine has practically withdrawn from the negotiating process,” the Interfax news agency reported.
The impasse stems primarily from Russia’s insistence on maintaining control of large swaths of Ukrainian territory, and Russia President Vladimir Putin’s apparent determination to push ahead with his offensive. But another factor is an emboldened Ukraine: Its successes on the battlefield, combined with anger over Russian atrocities, have the Ukrainian public less willing to accept a negotiated peace that would keep a significant amount of land in Russian hands.
Ukraine is further bolstered by an influx of weapons and aid from the West. The U.S. Senate is expected to approve a $40 billion package of military and economic aid for Ukraine as early as Wednesday.
“Now that we feel more confident in the fight, our position in the negotiations is also getting tougher,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, told a German newspaper in an interview last week. “The real problem is that Russia does not show the desire to participate in real and substantive negotiations.”
In Russia, officials say that it is the Ukrainians that are intransigent and that they are being egged on to continue the fight by Western leaders. Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, of Estonia, for instance, said the West needed to push for a defeat of Mr. Putin rather than “a peace that allows aggression to pay off.”
Both sides have stuck to talking points that advanced their own agenda. Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky, in his first interview with a Western news outlet since the beginning of the war, claimed that Ukrainian negotiators had previously agreed to much of the draft deal that he said Russia had submitted to Ukraine last month.
“But they probably represent that part of the Ukrainian elite that is most interested in reaching a peace agreement,” Mr. Medinsky said, referring to the negotiators. “And there is probably another part of the elite that doesn’t want peace and that draws direct financial and political benefit from a continuation of the war.”
Discussions among midlevel negotiators have continued for weeks. But in a sign of how far off a peace agreement now appears to be to both sides, negotiators were focused on more granular issues like prisoner exchanges and humanitarian efforts, and on lifting Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
Still, the fact that some talks have been taking place at all shows that a negotiated end to the war is not entirely out of reach. On Monday, after weeks of negotiations that both sides worked to keep secret, Ukraine agreed to surrender its fighters sheltering in a steel plant in the port city of Mariupol. Officials said they expected the fighters to be freed by Russia in a prisoner exchange.