The current peace talks between Russia and Ukraine take me back to June 2012, when I was sitting in Geneva with Sergey Lavrov, Hillary Clinton and others, drafting an agreement to end civil war in Syria. Whenever agreement was near, Lavrov’s phone would ring, and a sharp voice would bark instructions to him. “Putin!” he would exclaim as each call ended: Lavrov is more a lawyer who has to please a nightmare of a client than a foreign minister running his own brief.
These dictatorial interjections did not help matters, but far more ominous for today’s catastrophic situation for innocent Ukrainians is what happened next. We reached agreement, convened a peace conference with the Syrians, and then the Russians failed to honour their side of the deal — to deliver the Assad regime into sharing power with their opposition. Moscow chose to step up its own murderous intervention instead. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were always stringing us along.
The same might well be true of the present talks. It suits Putin to have negotiations in progress, allowing him to look reasonable, blame the Ukrainians for intransigence, even though he has invaded their country, soothe domestic public opinion and give China an excuse for not taking any peace initiative of its own. At the very same time he is stepping up the bombardment of civilians and attempting to regroup his forces for further offensives.
Even in the unlikely scenario that Putin’s intentions in pursuing talks are genuine, the issues are formidably difficult to resolve and will only become more so as the horrors, and indeed war crimes, add up to create an enmity that will last for generations. The future status of Crimea and of Donetsk and Luhansk — not to mention the boundaries of the latter two — are already intensely divisive. Add in a few more weeks of war and the list of near-insoluble issues only lengthens. If Russia takes Mariupol, establishing a land-bridge to Crimea, would it ever agree to give that up? Who pays for the damage to Ukrainian infrastructure, running at tens of billions of dollars a day? How are the lives lost, and the millions of families uprooted from their homes, to be reflected in a peace deal?
President Zelensky is proving an extraordinary war leader, and his own sincerity in seeking peace is not in doubt. He has used history with powerful effect in his addresses to western parliaments. But his statement last week that “All wars end in agreements”, understandably designed to reassure his citizens, is sadly not an accurate one. Many wars end in the collapse or annihilation of one side, or in a stalemate that defines new borders, or in an agreement made unwillingly under extreme duress.
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This is what Putin will have in mind. Even he can probably see that his objective of only a month ago, to bring all of Ukraine and its people under his sway, is now unattainable. But he probably believes that a second-best goal, of stripping Ukraine of key territory and leaving it less defensible and more neutralised, is still in play. For that, he is prepared to lay waste many more of Ukraine’s towns and cities.
Therefore, while it will be a very pleasant surprise if the talks being hosted by Turkey produce a breakthrough, it is more likely that a peace deal will become no nearer as the weeks go by. The West must be ready for the consequences of that: finding more sanctions to impose, adapting to energy and commodity shortages, increasing the flow of lethal aid to Ukraine, and welcoming even greater numbers of refugees. It is quite probable that the second phase of the war will be the bloody stalemate predicted by many military experts in recent days.
Yet western capitals also have to prepare in the background for what will be a vital part of any peace deal that ever does emerge: Ukrainian neutrality. This is the issue that has offered negotiators some hope. Putin demands a neutral Ukraine, and Zelensky, given that Nato remains closed to him, is offering that. Neutrality may be the foundation stone of a sustainable peace for Ukraine, but it is no simple solution. It can easily be a trap, an illusion or, at worst, a tripwire for wars to come.
The Russian version of Ukrainian neutrality is that it would be something like Austria in the Cold War, with strictly limited armed forces, no foreign bases, guaranteed by the big powers — in effect, at the mercy of the military blocs in close proximity to it and relying on their mutual deterrence. It is easy to see why this approach might work for Russia. A weak Ukraine would live next door to a powerful Russia, hoping for support in a crisis from distant friends.
Austria stayed out of Nato but joined the EU, one aspect of this model that might appeal in Kiev. Since then, however, the EU has expanded a common security and defence policy, so the question of whether an EU application is compatible with neutrality could be a stumbling block in future talks.
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In any case, neutrality that relies on enforcement by outside powers is illusory if they lack the military capability or political determination to go to war to protect it. While current talks seem to hold out the prospect of a guarantee by the five UN Security Council members, plus Germany and Turkey, that would really mean that a violation of neutrality would bring the two of those countries with the full means to intervene — the US and Russia — into military confrontation with each other. There would be an echo of Belgian neutrality, pre-1914, when Germany’s misreading of Britain’s resolve to uphold it added to the miscalculations that produced the First World War.
The neutrality that might work best for Ukrainians is neither Austrian nor Belgian, but Swiss, albeit on a bigger scale: integrated into western economies and societies but with the means to defend themselves. Other models will leave them open to Russian bullying, relying on leadership in Washington never wavering, destined either to be let down one day or become the spark for an even greater conflagration. The failure of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, when they gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for promises, underlines the point.
By their valiant resistance, Ukrainians have more than earned the right to choose their own destiny. They have also learnt, for all the help we are giving them, that their peace and security ultimately depends on their own resilience. Neutrality might be the best option for a country in their geographic position. But they will need a muscular, self-reliant, ruggedly independent neutrality if they are ever to sleep easily in the future.
